bailout

This video does not mention Austria by name, focusing instead on Ireland, Spain and Greece, but Austria is more of the problem for the Germans as they are leveraged to Eastern Europe. German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck became the…

After Iceland collapsed and went into Depression, there were a number of reports in the press regarding countries with outsized financial sectors. The worry was that the collapse of Iceland was not an isolated incident, but rather a…

McGraw Hill is one of the major book publishers in the United States. It also happens to own Standard & Poors, a well-known rating agency. Fellow econblogger Barry Ritholtz was due to release a book via McGraw Hill titled "Bailout…

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has issued a damning assessment of the Geithner bailout package. His main criticism is that Geithner's aims are the same narrow set of goals set out by the Bush Administration of working through this…

Bill Gross, the founder of PIMCO and manager of the world's largest bond fund, has just released his most recent Economic Outlook. In it, he takes a tack regarding the fix to the present turmoil in the markets with which I disagree.…

In case you missed it, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have cost taxpayers tens of billions to date. The bill is still rising, however, as the two companies are looking for $50 billion more to avoid technical insolvency. Then there is…

Government policy must be well-crafted in order to avoid negative unintended consequences that arise when the government inserts itself into the private sector. And this is where I am having a problem with the Obama Administration.…

When the Bush Administration gave banks money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), it was not a complete freebie. The government has received preferred shares in many institutions. This shares pay dividends to the government…

The need to bailout banks for their aggressive lending in central and eastern Europe is becoming ever more apparent. An Austrian bank has taken the lead in getting a consortium of banks together to lobby the European Union for bailout…

This post from January 2009 explains why banks do not increase lending capacity when uncertainty about the level of existing loan losses already on their balance sheet makes them worry about future loan losses. Credit wariness will be the…