Credit Writedowns

Asset bubbles are strange animals. Ideally, you would like to punch the air out of them relatively early before they become a real danger but, in practice, it is not quite so simple. Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan have actually both argued…

You will never hear this term again on Credit Writedowns – not from me, not from Marshall or anywhere else.  I am sick of hearing this phrase and am banning it for good – hoping it goes away and dies a gruesome and painful death.…

You probably saw in my links that Fiat had bowed out because of German government demands. The Magna story also comes via the BBC: Canadian car parts maker Magna International is the preferred bidder for GM Europe, owner of Opel and…

Marshall Auerback here with some thoughts on the UK given the recent stellar performance of Sterling. “The Conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed, that it is ‘rash’ to employ men, and…

Is the housing market in the U.K. bottoming?  Many pundits are talking as if it is and now we get the Nationwide data for May 2009 which shows a second rise in three months.  I am sceptical that we are at a bottom, so let’s see what the…

Anglo Irish gets aid from Dublin 4 billion euros is a lot of dosh. The Irish banking crisis is obviously not over. Eurozone inflation at record low - BBC News "Prices in the eurozone stopped rising in May - with the annual…

Below is the opening text to the U.S. government’s press release on the revised GDP numbers from the last quarter.  I have highlighted the most relevant parts in bold.  Overall, these revisions are not significant.  The main…

In five minutes we get GDP revisions.  Here is what Brown Brothers Harriman’s currency team says is happening in markets ahead of that data.  Basically, it is a resumption of the weak dollar trade with gold, oil and foreign…

I have had a number of posts on mark-to-market accounting in the recent past.  Most recently, the posts have suggested that accounting is going to be favourable to banks and their quest to present a well-capitalized face to the world (see…

This is the assessment of den Danske Bank as reported by Edward Hugh.  The last time I mentioned the Baltics was on May 12th in my post “A bearish view on Eastern Europe.”  I ended saying the Scandinavian banks’ exposure to the Baltics is…