Monetary System

Baltic currencies are overvalued, which has led to hot money flows and unsustainable levels of consumption. A crash is all but inevitable. The Baltics want in to the Euro, Estonia and Lithuania in particular. They are willing to…

As you may recall, Roskilde Bank in Denmark was recently rescued by the Danish central bank as it fell prey to the recession in Denmark. However, shareholders there are still fighting to save the bank, pitting interested parties against…

Below are the latest writedown stories from the web that I have seen. For the full timeline of news, visit my credit crisis timeline. Bloomberg recently updated their tally of writedowns to arrive at $501 Billion to date. That is on 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.

I'm getting a lot of mail about the Rosenberg post and my mea culpa on inflation. To be blunt, a lot of you think I'm out to lunch and Rosenberg is too -- after all inflation is over 5% and that's just the bogus CPI measure our governments…

Another blurb on David Rosenberg of Merrill Lynch, this time from the Globe & Mail in Canada where Rosenberg is from. This one is more about Merrill and its culture than Rosenberg. The paper points out the irony of Rosenberg being the…