Economy

Late last month, I made a big to-do about the Baltics becoming the next Argentina. Well, part of that mess is unraveling as we speak. Estonia is in recession and Latvia is headed for recession.Read my translation of a Dagens Nyheter article…

Despite my protestations that inflation is due to fall sharply over the next six months, I do have to point out that real interest rates are not only negative in the U.S. all the way across the curve, they are also negative in most of the…

(See my Credit Crisis Timeline for the news stories associated with the writedowns and related events during the crisis, the most recent of which you can find here.)Yalman Onaran at Bloomberg News has tallied the writedowns in the credit…

UBS reported a loss of 358 million Swiss Francs ($332 million) after writing down a further $5.1 billion in debt.In my post yesterday, I said the market expected as much. But, more importantly UBS has confirmed plans also mentioned in…

I wish it were not so, but it is increasingly obvious that every part of the financial sector in the United States is infected by this menacing plague of credit losses and writedowns. Now it comes to light that the five biggest U.S. credit…

Let's hope the UBS earnings report is not as bad as Merrill. If you recall, Citi, Merrills and UBS are the three worst offenders when it comes to writedowns. Given the recent asset sales by RBS and Merrill, one would expect to see some…

A credit writedown is a reduction in the value of an asset as it is carried on a company's balance sheet. As these losses must also be reflected on the income statement, credit writedowns result in massive losses.

This commentary in the Financial Times from Byron Wien, the former Morgan Stanley guru, is spot on. Everyone making a decision to vote for President in the U.S. should heed Wien's word before pulling that lever.America’s decline will not…

On Friday, Bloomberg quoted a former LTCM partner as saying the $1.9 trillion hedge fund industry faces "much worse'' conditions than in 1998, when Long-Term Capital Management LP collapsed. "It's definitely a trickier…

After RBS's writedowns on Friday, Bloomberg estimated that we have had nearly $500 billion in writedowns in the so-called 'sub-prime' crisis to date.Barclays, Britain's third-biggest bank, had first-half writedowns of 2.8 billion pounds, it…