Monetary System

Morgan Stanley has an interesting piece out this morning called Debtflation. In the past, they have raised alarm bells over what they see as embedded inflation in the loose monetary policy presently being followed by most central…

John Meriwether, the 62-year old former Salomon bond trader and LTCM wizard is back for, what is this, his fourth go round. For those of you who don’t remember the 1980s, John Meriwether was the biggest of the ‘big swinging dicks’ on…

John Gapper had a good piece in the FT yesterday called “Goldman should be allowed to fail.” His conclusion is that Goldman is allowed to game the system. It is a broker-dealer masquerading as a bank. It takes on much more risk than a…

You are a teacher at a local primary school. Each school day you and some of your colleagues watch over the children at the school playground to make sure all of the children follow the rules and keep their hands to themselves. Your role is…

Watch the hour-long retrospective which aired tonight on PBS’s Frontline.  It should be very enlighteningregarding the seeds of the bubble and meltdown.  It examines who the players in the 1990s and 2000s were, what their attitude to…

From the FDIC: San Joaquin Bank, Bakersfield, California, was closed today by the California Department of Financial Institutions, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. To protect the depositors,…

Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, is certainly looks to be fighting the good fight. At the conclusion of the Buttonwood Gathering in New York on Fixing Finance, she met with Tech Ticker’s Aaron Task and gave him…

I was heartened to hear that Alan Greenspan has repudiated the Too Big to Fail doctrine (as practiced in the Bush and Obama Administrations) in such unequivocal terms. He almost sounded like a Teddy Roosevelt trust buster. Nevertheless,…

In speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations, Greenspan said what I have heard many other credible financial experts say, namely that financial institutions which are ‘too big to fail’ (TBTF) are simply too big. Is this Alan Greenspan…

This is a cross-post from an article I wrote at the finance site New Deal 2.0, a one-stop-shop for current news, sharp analysis and potential solutions of the country’s fiscal crisis. Edward linked to this in this morning's links, saying "I…