Credit Writedowns

With the Economic Patriot Act past the Senate - including hundreds of billions in pork barrel - sweeteners, it's time to focus in a little on politics. I'll lead off the round-up there, trying to keep it fair despite my obvious…

I try to report on these numbers as objectively as possible, but the drip-drip of negative news out of the U.S. starts to wear on you. Jobless claims were expected to drop substantially after the effects of Hurricane Ike wore off. I was…

Below is an article I wrote that appears in this morning's Guardian Newspaper in the UK. The crux of the article is that European politicians need to realise that their banks are not immune from the crisis that has hit the United States and…

Nationwide released its monthly survey of U.K. house prices and the results are not promising. In September 2008, the month-to-month of 1.7% matched last month's decline, but the annual change in Nationwide's index fell 12.4%, the largest…

Readers,I have noticed recently that Google Reader has been taking an annoyingly long time to update some of my RSS feeds. NewsGator and Microsoft Outlook clients do not seem to have this problem. I have been trying to get a straight…

The Senate has now passed the bailout bill Economic Patriot Act that the Bush Administration had a heavy hand in crafting. This bill, while better than nothing, is unlikely to alleviate for long the acute problems the financial markets are…

Hansruedi Ramsauer is one of the foremost German-language finance bloggers, writing over at the Swiss site Zeitenwende. In a recent post, he draws attention to the dire state of Swiss banking and calls on Swiss politicians to act now to…

The numbers on auto sales were unbelievably bad for September -- Ford down 34%. Honda down 24%, Toyota down 32%, Nissan down 37%. Amazingly, G.M. was at the head of the pack with sales down only 16 percent. (I guess those Escalade Hybrids…

Warren Buffett is all over the place these days. He was busy investing at Constellation Energy and Goldman Sachs. Now, he's investing at GE -- $3 billion at that. Judging by his market timing approach, it does seem assets are cheap…

The ISM Manufacturing survey, a widely-followed gauge of manufacturing activity in the United States, plunged in September from a near-recession reading of 49.9 in August to the deep recessionary level of 43.5. This shockingly steep fall…