Monetary System

Germany never participated in the upswing of the housing bubble. This fact has led German politicians of all stripes to mistakenly believe their banking system was somehow immune to the problems infecting bubble markets like the US or…

This post is going to be a bit wonkish.  I apologize for those of you who are not economics geeks.  Hopefully, you will find it interesting nonetheless. At the urging of my good friend Marshall Auerback, I have been looking into…

On numerous occasions you will have heard me use the term ‘monetizing debt’ to describe what happens when the central bank creates money out of thin air in order to increase reserves in the banking system. The central bank is certainly…

Earnings season is upon us and the Swedish banks have begun reporting earnings. Their results have seen huge writedowns that demonstrate large and continued exposure to souring loans in the Baltics. Handelsbanken and Nordea reported…

This just hit the wires. NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CIT Group Inc. (NYSE: CIT), a leading provider of financing to small businesses and middle market companies, today announced that it entered into a $3 billion loan facility provided by a…

The bloggers at bloggers at UMKC’s economics blog have been making the case that California’s IOUs are a currency.  Randy Wray’s entry last Monday was particularly provocative because he suggests a movement to loosen national…

Back in April, I mentioned a story about BTA, a bank in Kazakhstan that had been nationalized by the state in February.  The interesting bit about the story was that interested parties from abroad (including Morgan Stanley) had…

Every country has a problem child or two in the financial services sector. America has Citigroup and Bank of America. Britain has RBS and HBOS/Lloyds.  And Germany has Hypo Real Estate.  I have been chronicling problems at the…

These two seizures are going to be costly. The first one here, Vineyard Bank in California  is going to cost the taxpayer an estimated $579 million.  The second, Temecula Valley Bank in North Carolina, is estimated to cost $391…

The first bank failure is in Georgia, a state where many FDIC seizures have taken place. On Friday, July 17, 2009, First Piedmont Bank, Winder, GA was closed by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance, and the Federal Deposit…