banks

My blog title comes from the title of an article, "Bank failures to surge in coming years" by MarketWatch on 23 May 2008. I highly recommend reading the full article. It mentions that only 3 banks have actually failed so far in…

Citigroup, Merrill, UBS Face Further Writedowns, Whitney SaysBy Jeff KearnsJune 9 (Bloomberg) -- Citigroup Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. and UBS AG may post further writedowns of $10 billion on their debt holdings after the two biggest bond…

RBS failed to get all the money it needed for its rights issue with 300 million shares still in the hands of its underwriters, reports the FT. These shares are to be sold today. This massive $24 billion (£ 12 billion) shows the limits of…

This sounds a lot like Bradford and Bingley in the UK. Lehman is really on the edge of collapsing. They need the money....NOW! One must believe the second leg down in bank credit write-offs and the credit crunch has started.By Steve…

The FT reported today that Brazil, fattened by newly found oil reserves and a sky-high oil price, is getting into the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) game. They are ready to fund $200 billion toward this project and have built up the currency…

The Sunday Telegraph is reporting yet another major Western bank is going cap in hand to sovereign wealth funds in order to stave off the inevitable crisis. This time its Barclays, Britain's third largest bank. At a time when RBS is…

The bad news in the financial sector keeps coming. Today, the news is about National City, a Cleveland-based regional bank in the US. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has put Nat…

Mish over at the Global Economic Trend Analysis caught a story in the FT about the possibility of banks being forced to put $5 trillion back on their balance sheets.The FT article says:Accounting changes could force U.S. banks to take…

Yesterday, in a post entitled "De-leveraging," I argued that credit writedowns and the resulting deleveraging are highly deflationary. This is the core of the problem with the global financial system. I want to expand a bit on that…

The Globe & Mail is reporting that Lehman Brothers might have to go back to the capital raising trough again in order to shore up a leveraged and risky balance sheet. In the face of yesterday's credit downgrade by S&P, this sounds…