Yves Smith 7 posts 0 comments

Japan has just decided that Bitcoin is not a currency, which subjects it to sales and income taxes. This is consistent with the view of the Canadian Revenue Service, which has found Bitcoin to be property and not a legal currency, and the…

One suspects the reason for the sensitivity within the ranks of the Democratic party water-carriers to the “corporatist” label is that Obamacare is a textbook case. Democrats try to undermine this charge by serving up an example of…

The latest Fed confab at Jackson Hole is demonstrating that central bankers were so keen to avoid taking much blame for the global financial crisis that they also failed to learn critical lessons from it. That lapse in turn is directly…

Yves Smith argues that the US equity markets have come to play an outsized role in the US from a policy and practical level. And she warns that it is never a good idea to try to assess complex phenomena with a single metric.

Banks appear not to have heard the old Wall Street saying, “A position is a trade that didn’t work out.” I suspect they are going to be long their REO for a more protracted period than they anticipate. Stay tuned.

One of the striking aspects of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on Apple's aggressive tax-avoidance strategies is the way the Senators bent over backwards to declare Apple love even as they poked and prodded at…

It looks like someone at Fannie woke up and realized that any case of a guarantor voiding a policy was prima facie evidence that BofA had breached a rep and warranty about loan quality. Look at the examples: inflated appraisals and incomes.