Credit Writedowns

UPDATE: 12 Jan 2010: I am re-publishing this for the third time because of the situation at AIG. The question that Tim Iacono asked on his site a year ago in the post "Why aren't Americans rioting?" is based on an article from Alternet.…

When the euro was introduced about ten years ago, the pessimists didn't give it much chance of reaching its tenth anniversary. The euro, or so the argument went, was doomed from the outset because of the wide spread in economic performance…

Goldman Sachs London conducted a poll of fund managers today that had interesting results. The poll demonstrated that fund managers are expecting deflation more than inflation and that they expect the U.S. or Asia to escape the downturn…

Twitter, Communication, and My Intermittent Inner Luddite - naked capitalism (Yves Smith doesn't like the always on culture. Neither do I. I use all the new media but I have similar misgivings about them) Fin24.com - SA house prices…

I just picked up two reports on California's desperate situation. California, whose legislature and Governor have been hold up in around the clock negotiations, is now issuing IOU's instead of cash. They have also been downgraded by Moody's…

What are the Swiss doing selling dollars? I don't have an answer to this question. But, I thought I would posit it because a reader tipped me off to a development via the Blog Alea:

Happy Groundhog Day. By the way, the word on the street is that Germans who came over to Pennsylvania wanted to use hedgehogs in this mythical are-we-going-to-have -six-more-weeks-of-winter ritual. But, because there are no hedgehogs, they…

The ISM Manufacturing Survey came out. The PMI index was 35.6, up from 32.4 in December. It was bad (50 is the tipping point between recession and growth), but it's not all bad. There were two industries with growth: textiles and petroleum.…

The statistics coming out of Japan have been truly awful of late. In my last post, you saw a small video connecting reduced spending in the U.S. to Japan. However, I need to be more explicit about how things are unraveling in Japan. The…

U.S. consumer spending contracted more than anticipated in December 2008, declining by 1.0%. However, this number is a look into the past and does little to help predict how spending will trend going forward.