Credit Writedowns

I was just discussing the recent revelation by the Federal Reserve's Don Kohn that the Fed has secretly been aiding the banking sector via AIG (here, here and here), when it was pointed out to me that a number of smart investors have been…

Don Kohn's testimony before the Senate Banking committee was so outrageous that I feel compelled to re-post the first paragraphs of this article from Willem Buiter about the moral hazard it represents. Basically, the U.S. government…

Historic P/E Ratio for the S&P 500 Hat tip Barry Ritholtz Backdoor Bailouts for Goldman Sachs? - Barry Ritholtz Former Australian Prime Minister Savages Geithner's Performance in the Asian Crisis - Yves Smith Do not rely on…

Make no bones about it, Manhattan real estate prices have been in an extreme bubble.  With stock prices down and Wall Street shedding jobs massively, this has come to an end. With sales prices of Manhattan apartments having tumbled by…

Martin Fridson is one of the best known high yield bond analysts out there. For a very long time he was the head of Merrill's high yield research group, the group that analyses the prospects of debt issued by companies with non-investment…

This is the most important  employment number in recent memory. Consensus estimates were for 650,000 with a wide range from 500,000 to 800,000.   Everyone is looking to this number to determine where we are headed. There was a…

Apple Safari 4 is out and it's slick and lightning fast. Most people are still using Internet Explorer, which quite frankly does not meet the grade. Firefox, which I had been using, has huge memory bloat if you leave the browser open for…

After another brutal day in the market, whether the market is bottoming does not seem like the question on most people's minds. Ten stocks declined for every one up today -- and on heavy volume. Retail investors are clearly switching into…

Since Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in September, the capital markets have been all but shut to large banks globally. Investors were spooked by the evisceration at Lehman, Washington Mutual and Wachovia to name but a few cases of near…

Economist's View: "Ridding Ourselves of the Zombies" Wall Street on the Tundra - vanityfair.com Ford Equitizing $10.4 Billion In Debt - Tyler Durden Follow the money to see Hungary's plight - BBC News FDIC Insurance Fund May Run…