News from around the web: 2009-09-14

"It’s tempting to call the turn in the mortgage market at this point, and there is certainly concrete evidence that lending for house purchase is increasing," said the CML’s economist Paul Samter. "But there are still constraints affecting the lending industry’s capacity to fund increased lending, as well as less consumer motivation to remortgage for the time being." Good clip from today’s “Wake Up to Money” broadcast highlighting this: https://www.creditwritedowns.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/money_20090914-0618a.mp3

A great piece demonstrating how we transpose our culture onto our historical narratives in a distorted way. Quite disturbing to me.

""We don’t see any green shoots," he said at the World Economic Forum in Dalian, China. Sir Martin, chief executive of WPP, the world’s largest marketing company by revenue, forecast a V-shaped economic recovery in China but was more cautious about other parts of the world. He said advertising spend will remain subdued and warned that clients "won’t invest again until they are sure" of the recovery."

This demonstrates the fragility of the recovery

Some commentary on why it’s so hard to regulate Wall Street from seven finance talking heads including me.

Hoenig is the best thing that can happen to the FOMC – coming in 2010.  "”The distrust of centralization and monolithic power is a theme throughout American history. This should not be lost on Americans," says Hoenig. One has only to look at the expiration of the charter of the first U.S. Bank, or the dismantling of the second U.S. Bank by Andrew Jackson, to get some sense of the history. "Today," he notes, "the top 20 banks own 70% of the [banking system’s] assets."”

London’s leading gold forecaster has advised clients to liquidate holdings of gold and silver until the latest speculative fever abates, warning that futures contracts on New York’s Comex exchange are flashing warning signals.

"The US may import fewer tyres from China, but this decision is not going to jumpstart moribund domestic tyre production. This is protectionism without the protection, writes Charles Freeman"

“I’ve apologized one time” to Obama, the Republican congressman from South Carolina told the Fox News Sunday program. “I believe that is sufficient.”

Trade war, here we come!

Here is Germany’s bottomless pit back for more handouts. "The Tagesspiegel am Sonntag weekly, citing a confidential Bundesbank study, said HRE had 16.3 billion euros ($23.8 billion) in unrealized losses on loans and securities on its books… A spokesman for HRE described the figures in the report as "unrealistic" because they assumed the bank would sell off assets immediately and take actual losses, which was not planned."

This man will certainly be the first to the Hall from Japan. Much deserved kudos.

"The enormous debt levels in Canada, now 140% of personal disposable income, do not even include all the financial commitments and contracts we have from cellphones to car leases, says Doug Porter, deputy chief economist with Bank of Montreal."

"California has one of the most overcrowded and underfunded prison systems in the country, prompting three federal judges in August to order it to develop a plan to free about 46,000 prisoners in the next two years."

"What do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president? A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt… Despite the sense of white grievance, though, blacks are the ones who are taking the brunt of the recession, with disproportionately high levels of foreclosures and unemployment."

"This was a silly summer, as wasteful in its way as the summer of 2001, when Washington dithered over the now-forgotten Gary Condit scandal while Al Qaeda plotted. The president deserves his share of the blame."