Economy

Commercial banks and savings institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) reported an aggregate profit of $35.3 billion in the third quarter of 2011, an $11.5 billion improvement from the $23.8 billion in net…

Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Chief Executive Officer Mohamed A. El-Erian told Bloomberg TV’s Betty Liu and Dominic Chu this morning that U.S. economic conditions are “terrifying” as the nation struggles to recover from recession.…

This will surprise many. Der Spiegel reports that Germany’s fiscal management is not as “exemplary” as most perceive.

The GAO says that issues with the TARP are not “material” and chooses instead to go with the less damning term of “significant”. A three-year record of getting it wrong would seem to suggest otherwise. We get that the $470 billion TARP was…

Bank borrowing from the ECB reach a new high for the year at today's 7-day repo operation. Banks borrowed 247.17 bln euros for a week at 1.25% fixed rate. The key question is what are banks doing with those euros. The answer is that…

A unilateral exit would be a devastating event for Italy and the euro zone. Inflation would be high but bank and national solvency issues would recede. If the exit were done under these nationalistic pre-conditions of redomination, most of…

Without a credible intervention this process almost always ends the same way. There is in my opinion a very high probability that within weeks, or months at most, Greece will be forced to freeze bank deposits as a prelude to leaving the…

And the crisis continues in Belgium ... The acting Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo officially resigned on Monday night. He has been trying to form a government. But after a serious step forward in October, stalled negotiations have led…

As I said in defense of the ECB last week, “central bankers always prefer to force elected officials to make the tough political choices that are the essence of fiscal policy.” The ECB wants this whole problem to be resolved by elected…

The following is the text of today’s Moody’s press release on the Irish banking system. London, 21 November 2011 -- The outlook on Ireland's banking system remains negative, says Moody's Investors Service in a Banking System Outlook…