banks

The Beijing Olympic games are supposed to be China's coming out cotillion. As the west struggles with deleveraging and recession, China wants to make a statement that it has arrived. The games have gone off remarkably well and most…

From where I sit, today was a complete disaster for U.S. finance. Fannie and Freddie imploded -- their shares quickly approach zero. Lehman admitted it is scared witless and has tried to line up foreign governments to bail it out. States…

Lehman Brothers is obviously desperate to avoid Bear Stearns' fate. The FT is reporting that Lehman held secret talks with foreign investors to sell up to 50% of the company. Previously, I thought one investor might be the Korea…

Apparently, Lehman Brothers was looking to strike a deal with a Korean Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) for a whopping $5 billion, but the deal fell through -- this according to the NY Post.Lehman Brothers' embattled Chief Executive Dick Fuld…

Kenneth Rogoff, the Harvard Professor and former IMF Chief Economist shares my view that another large U.S. financial institution will go bust. I predicted this will happen before the end of 2008. He gives no specific date, but he does go…

As you may recall, Roskilde Bank in Denmark was recently rescued by the Danish central bank as it fell prey to the recession in Denmark. However, shareholders there are still fighting to save the bank, pitting interested parties against…

Below are the latest writedown stories from the web that I have seen. For the full timeline of news, visit my credit crisis timeline. Bloomberg recently updated their tally of writedowns to arrive at $501 Billion to date. That is on the…

The Wall Street Journal has a good piece from Yuka Hayashi about lessons that can be learned from Japan's experiences with its bank crisis in the 1990s. While I do take issue with a number of the article's assertions, on the whole it sheds…

(See my Credit Crisis Timeline for the news stories associated with the writedowns and related events during the crisis, the most recent of which you can find here.)Yalman Onaran at Bloomberg News has tallied the writedowns in the credit…