Monetary System

Remember how the impartial accountancies lost their way during the tech bubble? The most egregious case was Arthur Andersen's wrongdoings at Enron, which eventually bankrupted both Enron and Arthur Anderson. Well in this particular crisis…

The blog site EconomPic Data has some nice pictures of Citi's writedowns to date. Here is one. Check out the site for another nice breakdown.According to Bloomberg, Citigroup has written down over $50 billion so far. Click here for a full…

Caroline Baum is one of the more insightful financial market pundits around. In her column she takes aim at Fannie and their private reward, public risk corporate setup. Basically, the Fannie-Freddie bailout is a simple case of "heads and…

Lloyds TSB announced first half results, a 70% fall in pre-tax profits. Yet, Lloyds' management was confident enough to raise the dividend 2p a share to 11. 4p. This strikes me as completely out of touch with market conditions. In the…

Merrill Lynch analyst Guy Moszkowski says that Goldman Sachs is looking to buy a deposit-taking bank to avoid the liquidity problems that were Bear's downfall and may now hit Merrill Lynch itself. Goldman’s chief financial officer, David…

Last week, we heard that Australia's NAB had to take a massive writedown due to American CDO exposure (apparently triggered by Merrill Lynch). Yesterday, we heard about Australia's ANZ Bank taking it on the chin to the tune of $1.2 million…

In further proof that we're back to the Great Depression again, everyone is talking about unsecured bank deposits. Basically, if you have less than $100K at an FDIC institution, you're good to go. If you have more, you'll need to spread…

I swear Merrill just wrote down $9.4 billion and sold its stake in Bloomberg two weeks ago. So why are they in the news AGAIN writing down another $5.7 billion? It's frightening to think this company is still a going concern. The company…

I fully anticipate this will happen, so the question becomes: what will the Fed do?The FDIC stepped in at two banks over the weekend, 1st National Bank of Nevada and First Heritage Bank. These banks failed as a result of construction loans…

"The Economist" has developed the Big Mac Index as a way to determine if currencies are overvalued or undervalued. The thought is that a McDonald's Big Mac being pretty much the same everywhere around the world, one should expect the cost…