Credit Writedowns

Alcohol used to seen as a recession-proof good. This downturn is changing that thinking as evidence of cutbacks in spending, consumption, and on-premise drinking abound.  Back in the Spring of 2008, Nielsen conducted a bunch of surveys…

Jeremy Grantham is out again with a very important investment strategy piece entitled “Boring Fair Price!”  He leads off by talking about how markets went from extremely overvalued a year ago to cheap back to a state which he considers fair…

In late June, I posted two items China’s present growth story is built on malinvestment and Chinese stock market bubble inflating, on the building bubble in Chinese lending and asset markets.  The crux of the posts was that China, in its…

The Sector Financial Balances Model of Aggregate Demand—Revised - Scott Fullwiler A great but dense analysis of the 1990s expansion and the present fiscal crisis Hotter weather fed growth of Incan empire - New Scientist Incan and…

We’re not really hard wired for making money in the markets. We use a lot of gut instincts, heuristics and plain illogic in making decisions.  The result is sub-optimal investment performance. This is the nothing new as the field of…

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has a good piece on Iceland out today at the Telegraph. The main point of his article is that Iceland is emerging from crisis and depression in a relatively healthy state due to a fifty percent currency…

Bernanke: 25 mega-firms are systemically vital - MarketWatch That's a lot more than the biggest banks we hear about Economist's View: From 1983: Health Care Reform in Canada Echoes of the debate today in the US Eliot Spitzer:…

In truth this is really two failures, but one had six subsidiaries so it counts as seven.  Here are the failures: The first bank is in New York. Waterford Village Bank, Clarence, New York, was closed by the New York State Banking…

This is an astonishing video in China with Hugh Hendry, the money manager who is bearish on China who I profiled earlier this month.  In it, he shows us building after building after building – all of them massive and all of them empty. …

Citigroup has just released a forecast which is very troublingregarding employment and growth in the Spanish economy.  With unemployment already having hit 17.9%, Citigroup expects layoffs to increase this to 22% in 2010.  Below…