bank run

Rumors of an impending bank failure in Latvia over the weekend led to a run on bank machines. In many places it was impossible to get money.

Opinion polls and surveys are finding an increasing number of people expect one or more countries to leave the euro zone. Investors are anxious. What is to be done? What makes this so difficult is that there are so many moving parts and…

News links for 5 December 2011 featuring stories on Europe, the sovereign debt crisis, and shadow banks,

What is clear is that, with the U.S. dollar as the world’s major reserve currency, this move to lower the price on U.S. dollar liquidity swap arrangements is due to the world’s banks being short U.S. dollars. In the past few days, there…

Financial news links for 30 November 2011

A unilateral exit would be a devastating event for Italy and the euro zone. Inflation would be high but bank and national solvency issues would recede. If the exit were done under these nationalistic pre-conditions of redomination, most of…

Without a credible intervention this process almost always ends the same way. There is in my opinion a very high probability that within weeks, or months at most, Greece will be forced to freeze bank deposits as a prelude to leaving the…

The most important debate of our lifetimes is now ongoing. The question: Should the ECB “write the check’ for the euro area national governments? In thinking about the answer to this all-important question, I prefer to shift the focus by…

Warren Buffett was on CNBC this morning for three hours talking about a whole range of issues from the European sovereign debt crisis to too big to fail to housing in the US to penalties for corporate crime. The video of Europe is below,…

Given Greek sentiment, in all likelihood, a referendum vote for the bailout agreement will fail. The question is “what then?” I would anticipate that, at a minimum, an an actual default which triggers credit default swaps with higher…