Credit Writedowns

At the end of last week, the warning came. The Chinese officially warned Hank Paulson et al. that they better get their act together on Fannie and Freddie. The Chinese own a ton of GSE paper and they would be hopping mad to see their…

It's time to get positive. A good friend of mine from Toronto was telling me today how depressing the drip-drip of bad news regarding the economy, the markets and housing is becoming. The housing bust has been going on for nearly two…

The S&P/Case-Shiller housing index is out for prices for June 2008. So, it's that time of the month again -- let's play the Case-Shiller time machine game. Basically, prices in the U.S. housing market have been falling for about two…

PIMCO, the brainchild of Bill Gross and now owned by the German insurance giant Allianz, is concerned enough about the bankruptcy of Roskilde Bank in Denmark to have sent the following e-mail out to its clients. I have put important parts…

As far back as May, I had warned that commercial property was destined for a bust -- collateral damage in the real economy. In particular, I mentioned the U.S. commercial real estate (CRE) market as a particular problem for local and…

The past few weeks I have been chronicling how Europe is fast catching up to the United States in terms of the magnitude of the housing bust and its effects on its economies. I'd like to turn back to the United States and Northern…

As the Democratic and Republican Conventions have begun, most Americans are going to get political overload as they are inundated with a media blitz by the U.S. presidential candidates and the inane trivialities of our media-driven…

Over the weekend the Danish Central Bank took over bankrupt Roskilde Bank, wiping out shareholders. Tiny Denmark has had a bankruptcy on its hands that is following the script of Northern Rock in the UK to a tee: After lending too much…

Not if you believe the figures from a University of Calgary - C.D. Howe Institute study comparing tax rates in 80 countries - remember, they're Canadians (hat tip Stephen Gordon). In this list, which includes all the major economies, the…

Last week, I showed two charts on returns on the Dow Jones Industrial Average that had two seemingly contradictory messages. In the first chart measuring 10-year returns, one could clearly see that long-term returns have been declining…