banks

So here’s the deal. What happened is that the financial sector taken as a whole moved into extremely short-term finance of positions in assets. This is a huge topic and is related to the transformation of investment banking partnerships…

Banking sectors in both countries are highly concentrated. The top four banks in Australia account for about three quarters of the banking assets. The top six Canadian banks account for upwards of 90% of the Canadian banking assets.…

the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the…

We’re more than 3 years out from a crisis caused in part by these very same decision-making processes on compensation. So why is it that we don’t fully understand them yet?

According to Austrian newspaper Der Standard, Austrian banks had 18.1 billion euros of exposure to foreign sovereign debt at the end of October. The debt to which the banks were most exposed were Polish, Italian, German and Hungarian…

Fortunately the ECB has deep pockets, and as I argue in this post, these will probably suffice to keep short term bond yields down to acceptable levels, and help the banks fund themselves and recapitalise. What the ECB’s LTRO’s won’t do is…

Is there any government body having a harder time of it these days than the SEC? Sometimes it feels like someone pinned a giant “Kick me” sign to its collective back. I’ve written previously about a key factor that I think is partly…

Read between the lines. Bank of America is on government life support. As a result, it is being forced to shed assets and cut staff in the hope that this will be enough to prevent its having to be bailed out or resolved. Moreover, a…

After the better than expected Spanish bond auction, eurozone sovereign spreads came in significantly yesterday. Even before today's auction, the widely watched Italian 10-year bond yield had fallen to 6.63 percent.

So why are these big name retailers suing the big banks. It's this chart that appears to be the smoking gun. Credit card interchange fees are the highest by a large margin. Clearly those charges that go into the bank and credit card…