accounting

Looks like there’s a storm brewing in the U.S. repo markets. It figures: profit-center banks have every motivation to stay one step ahead of the regs and the pols. Since the gamekeepers have now gotten around to looking at proprietary…

What I have been saying throughout 2011 is that margin compression is going to happen no matter what. The cuts have been made and so margins cannot grow any higher from cuts. It has to come from operating leverage that increases as a result…

What I have been saying throughout 2011 is that margin compression is going to happen no matter what. The cuts have been made and so margins cannot grow any higher from cuts. It has to come from operating leverage that increases as a result…

So here’s the deal. What happened is that the financial sector taken as a whole moved into extremely short-term finance of positions in assets. This is a huge topic and is related to the transformation of investment banking partnerships…

Every 60 days the Government Accountability Office issues a report on the various TARP programs. Each report looks at how the Office of Financial Stability, the body currently overseeing all TARP programs, is performing on a given metric.…

The GAO says that issues with the TARP are not “material” and chooses instead to go with the less damning term of “significant”. A three-year record of getting it wrong would seem to suggest otherwise. We get that the $470 billion TARP was…

In the video below, Bill Black discusses the issues he raised in a recent post about Bank of America’s accounting activities. At issue is the effect of its shift of assets from the holding company to its FDIC-insured subsidiary. In total,…

Bob Ivry, Hugh Son and Christine Harper have written an article that needs to be read by everyone interested in the financial crisis. The article (available here) is entitled: BofA Said to Split Regulators Over Moving Merrill Derivatives…

This is going to be a relatively long post. But I think it’s important. I have been meaning to update my thinking about the “Fake Recovery” which I heralded in early 2009 as the economy in the US began to turn. My view is that without…

Leverage is the practice of holding a small amount of government currency in reserve against IOUs denominated in the state’s unit of account while promising to convert those IOUs to currency. This can lead to a “run” on private IOUs,…