Monetary System

The following is the text of a James K. Galbraith’s written statement to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee delivered this May. Original text is here. Chairman Specter, Ranking Member Graham, Members of the Subcommittee, as a…

Hat tip Paul Kedrosky

Below is a partial list of April FDIC enforcement decisions and orders. I have only included cease-and-desist orders, prompt corrective action notices and termination of insurance orders as these are the signs of banking system distress.

I expected this (hat tip Scott). Goldman Sachs is hoping to avoid the Securities and Exchange Commission’s charge of fraud by reaching a settlement on a lesser offence and agreeing to a fine of hundreds of millions of dollars, according…

Frederick Sheehan is the author of Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession  (McGraw-Hill, 2009). A speech delivered at the Ludwig von Mises Institute Conference:…

This post by Paul McCulley,a Managing Director of PIMCO, is from a speech McCulley gave at Levy Institute and it comes via John Mauldin. Edward Harrison has inserted the images. They are not in the original. Enjoy. John Mauldin,…

Last spring and summer I wrote a series of articles on the bleak situation in Spain, centred on the Spanish Cajas (savings banks), the imploded housing market and the high level of unemployment. The gist of these posts was that Spain faced…

The FDIC is out with its Quarterly Banking Profile for Q1 2010. And despite a rise in the FDIC's 'Problem List of Banks' to 775 in Q1 from 702 at the end of 2009 and 552 in Q3 2009, banks earned a ton of money – more than $18 billion in the…

Long-term interest rates are really a series of short-term rates smashed together. The real reason that the Federal Reserve would lose control over short-term interest rates is because the economy was operating at full capacity and creating…

You hear the term "double dip recession" bandied about in the media a lot these days.  But there is no strict definition for what a double dip recession is or what it actually means to an economy. Have no fear; At the…