2010

by L. Randall Wray The Federal Reserve Bank was founded in an act of Congress in 1913, with its primary directive to “furnish an elastic currency.” Its mission was expanded in the aftermath of the Great Depression to include responsibility…

by L. Randall Wray We are in the third act of the theater of the absurd. In the first act, Chairman Bernanke created QE1, through which the Fed bought $1.75 trillion of assets from banks—mostly trashy mortgage backed securities, but also a…

Systemically Dangerous Institutions – the U.S., Iceland, and Ireland by William K. Black This column was prompted by Thomas Hoenig's December 1, 2010 op ed in the New York Times (“Too Big to Succeed”) warning that we must end banks…

Here are today's financial links including posts on robosigners, WikiLeaks and Goldman's win in high frequency trading case.

by William K. Black You know the administration is desperate when it creates a web page citing economists who support its capitulation on taxes. The web page cites the support of five economists. Peter Cardillo, the Bank of America, Greg…

Most of the headlines you’ll see related to the Federal Reserve’s Z.1 Flow of Funds report are focused on the change in household net worth. In the 3rd quarter 2010 report, released yesterday, the change was a positive one: household net…

Here's the daily links post. Before I send you off to the links I wanted to mention that I will be on Howard Green's show on BNN at 12:15 ET to talk about China and Wells Fargo amongst other topics. I really haven't been that good about…

by Marc Chandler Spanish bonds have fallen each day this week. The 13 bp increase today brings the 10-year yield increase to 30 bp this week, easily the worst performing bond market within the euro zone. Portugal has the dubious honor of…

We don’t want to get too caught up trying to guess the timing of the PBOC’s moves. Suffice to say that over the next year, it will continue to use a combination of policy rate hikes, reserve requirement hikes, and currency strength to help…

Hugh Hendry is back writing after a long hiatus. His latest commentary to investors makes for good reading. His thesis: we are in a world of debt deflation for which there are no policy remedies; the Fed is fighting an uphill battle and it…