banks

Jamie Dimon tells it like it is. When asked by CNBC's Erin Burnett's how business is going, Dimon replied "terrible." Here's how Reuters describes his comments: "November itself has been a terrible trading month ... (and) December so far is…

The Economist does a very good post-mortem on Iceland and its spectacular collapse with a number of lessons for other countries, especially those with oversized financial sectors like Ireland, Switzerland and the U.K.  Below is a snippet…

Yves Smith has a good post over at Naked Capitalism that brings attention to the fact that banks are hiding potential losses in Level Three assets. Ultimately, these losses are going to have to be recorded and that means more credit…

Here's a good little measure to see how far we've fallen: Just more than 1 year ago Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) paid $100bn for ABN Amro (80% cash). For this amount, RBS could buy:

I wrote a few weeks back about how your bailout money was being used for mergers and acquisitions to line bankers' pockets instead of for making loans to desperate homeowners. After receiving $25 billion in bailout funds, Citigroup…

A friend sent me a mock-up of an application for the free money the U.S. government is handing out in its bailout program. Very funny. Sign up for the EZ-Cash. (Hat-tip Scott)

The financial services sector has been the hardest hit sector in the credit crisis so far. Banks with large exposures to mortgage-backed securities like Citigroup, UBS and Merrill Lynch have suffered the most. This is largely because the…

Willem Buiter has a very useful and provocative blog at the Financial Times website called Mavercon.  The Dutch-born former Bank of England MPC member is not afraid to take policy makers to task or call a spade a spade. In his latest post…

When a bank with $2.2 trillion in assets is saved from potential ruin, it is big news. So, as you can imagine, every one and his brother has a take on what went wrong at Citigroup and whether the solution to 'fix' Citi was the right one.…