banks

A reader of our blog here at Credit Writedowns recently wrote to me, detailing why Italians voted as they did in the recent general election. Her view speaks more to a rejection of corporatism and corruption than austerity.

Commercial banks and savings institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) reported aggregate net income of $34.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012, a $9.3 billion (36.9 percent) improvement from the $25.3…

It has been some time now since the ECB turned to monetisation to deal with its sovereign debt crisis. At the time, the Germans were out in full force attempting to stop the train of events and keep the ECB out of the political economy.…

I’ll be watching a number of things in 2013 in order to get a better sense of what the future will bring. On January 22 Princeton University Press will be publishing my book, The Great Rebalancing: Trade, Conflict, and the Perilous Road…

In November, soon after France and Belgium were forced to pump another 5.5 billion euros into bailed out lender Dexia, the ratings agency Moody's stripped France of its AAA sovereign debt rating. The interesting bit was that Moody's…

The shareholders and subordinated bond holders of SNS Reaal are now fighting an alleged expropriation at the Dutch Council of State. In addition, these stakeholders are contesting the Dutch government's position that shareholders and…

Nationalised Dutch lender SNS Reaal, the fourth largest bank in the Netherlands has recently been nationalised despite a reported 13 percent Tier 1 capital level in the most recent round of banking stress tests in Europe. Clearly, the…

The much-touted European banking union, designed to separate country and banking risk seen as the nexus around which the sovereign debt crisis has moved, looks weak.

According to the Irish Times, the government of Ireland has entered into a deal with the ECB to cut the country's debt by liquidating the nationalised Irish bank Anglo Irish. As I noted in the Saturday post on Ireland's superior economic…

The continuing attempts to rescue the financial sector (especially in the United States) have laid bare the tremendous social costs created by the way finance dominates the economy. If anything, the various bailouts have actually…