Monetary System

This comes from Swiss daily Le Temps (my translation): Credit Suisse will request the creation of additional conditional capital of 3.98 million at the General Meeting of April 24. The operation is to guarantee to the bank the "strategic…

From the Wall Street Journal: In the latest dramatic move by federal authorities to prop up the nation's banking system, regulators late Friday seized control of the two largest wholesale credit unions in the U.S. after finding that…

Today, I want to make the case for seeing writedowns as central to this global downturn. To do so, we need to rewind and compare what is going on today with what we have experienced in the past. Drawing on this comparison, I can…

This video from the Charlie Rose show should give one a fairly complete view of most of the relevant finance and political issues surrounding the AIG situation. (hat tip Calculated Risk) Participants include bank analyst Meredith Whitney…

While most people have their attention tuned to the spectacle over at AIG, financial institutions in Europe are having their own difficulties. In the last day, I have seen news stories of European banks looking for ways to raise capital in…

This comes via the website The Agonist (Hat tip Scott).  I have bolded the important bits: So what are AIG’s arguments for making these bonus payments? All 450 employees of AIG in London, where the derivatives contracts were booked and…

The AIG employees who are the subject of so much venom because they have received massive bonuses while their organizatio is being propped up by $170 billion in taxpayer money are not even in the United States. They are in London.

This is a post I wrote last week on naked capitalism. In any banking crisis, the central question always is: which financial institutions now operating are insolvent, how can we identify them and remove them from the system, and how can…

I plan to visit Mexico early next month as I do at least one or twice every year. This year I question what awaits me as evidence that Mexico's economy and civil order is imploding mount. The latest strike against Mexico comes in its now…

With the shadow banking system of hedge funds and non-bank financial institutions in shambles and the banking system's credit shrinking, U.S. government officials are desperate to get credit into the system any way they can. A key part of…