Credit Writedowns

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…

  Here’s a nice clip from Stephen Roach from last week asking “where’s the demand?”  His thesis is pretty simple:  we have an inventory-induced upturn that might actually show positive GDP growth in the U.S. for Q3, what I…

President Barack Obama was elected last year in a sizable victory over his Republican competitor. Bolstering his position was the huge Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Given these advantages, combined with intelligence and…

S&P upgrades CMBS to AAA week after downgrading to BBB- - Rolfe Winkler Inexplicable. Digg Stops Hijacking Your Twitter Links, Not Sorry About It Agree 100% with this post. Very untrustworthy. Department store sales slip 11%…

13-minute video from the Wall Street Journal. Related stories: Iceland warms to Europe Iceland to hand bank stakes to creditors Iceland’s rehabilitation  

If you haven’t seen any of Jim the Realtor’s videos over at Calculated Risk, you are not getting a feel for what’s happening in residential real estate in America.  The guy really gives the whole housing problem in California a look…

Over the past week, America’s banks have had a bumper earning season, in part courtesy of the Federal Reserve’s accommodative monetary policy. Even before this week, a number of market pundits (including me) began to wonder aloud whether…

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…