Credit Writedowns

We have now moved from Blogger to WordPress as the software for the site, but everything else should remain pretty much the same. You may have noticed we were offline for a few hours earlier today, but everything is back to normal -- or at…

Below is a link to an article I wrote about the Bank of England's aggressive 1.5% interest rate cut that appeared in yesterday's Guardian newspaper.The unkindest cut, GuardianThe long and short of it is that I am very skeptical about the…

I am off to the beach this weekend, so blogging will be light. But I wanted to ask for help on a technical issue first.We have been using Blogger's platform to run this blog for the past 8 months or so. However, we have run up against a…

It is now a ritual. Every Friday night the FDIC announces which banks have been playing fast and loose with our money and need to be shut down. This week, there are two banks, Security Pacific of Los Angeles and Franklin of Houston.…

For those of you concerned about the Fed's risky behavior, its ballooning balance sheet, and its acceptance of dodgy collateral, well you may be about to see whether the American democracy can allow this unchecked power to continue without…

After stalling at 6.1% in September, the U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 6.5%. This was a truly ugly report as we saw payrolls go down by 240,000 - more than forecast and September was revised up significantly from 169,000 to 284,000.…

So, here we are one day into a brave new world, having seen America elect Barack Obama President. You might think the clouds would part, the sun would come out and all would be well with the world. Yet, it seems like quite the opposite is…

Central banks around the world are whacking interest rates at a breakneck clip. The Fed, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Bank of Japan and now the ECB and the BoE. The BoE made the most dramatic move with an outsized 150 basis point…

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the sometimes obnoxious writer of the "Black Swan" is now a fund manager. His fund focuses on hedging against "Black Swan" events that are deemed highly unlikely by purchasing thing like out-of-the-money puts.…

Tomorrow is the day that we get a big piece of the data puzzle for the U.S. when the unemployment report is released. Most economists are expecting something very ugly with over 200,000 jobs lost. In the interim, we might be able to use…