banks

Financial news for 12 January 2012

We continue to witness remarkable developments in the intersection of the related fields of economics, finance, ethics, law, and regulation. Each of these five fields ignores a sixth related field – white-collar criminology. The six fields…

Happy Wednesday. I know the news is 'less good' today than it was when I last wrote you but writing these weeklies always puts me in a more positive frame of mind. Nevertheless, today's topic is about downside risk. My hope is to frame the…

Senior former regulators are willing to be quoted by name asserting that Obama’s (not Bush’s) financial regulatory leaders are blocking lawsuits against fraudulent financial elites and their anti-regulatory co-conspirators because they fear…

Mr. Obama’s Secretary Geithner went to Europe met with EU leaders to demand that Greece make the write-downs voluntary on the part of banks and creditors. He explained that U.S. banks had bet that Greece would not default – and their net…

Every 60 days the Government Accountability Office issues a report on the various TARP programs. Each report looks at how the Office of Financial Stability, the body currently overseeing all TARP programs, is performing on a given metric.…

With the Chinese New Year holiday period approaching, it becomes a bit harder to discern PBOC’s policy intentions. It typically adds liquidity aggressively ahead of the holidays, but this year it comes at a time when the central bank is…

In addition to the European economic recession exerting a drag on the rest of the world, the real threat of bankruptcy of a major financial institution can rapidly spread throughout the globe as a result of a run on the banks or the opaque…

At the end of last year, Italian 10-year yields were more than 200 bp on top of Spain. The spread has narrowed in recent days, but is still well beyond the euro era average of about 10 bp and the late 2008 extreme near 65 bp. There is more…

It is my view that the ECB is now the only thing between the economy and widespread bank failures, but I also concur that the consequence of this is a permanent outsourcing of the interbank market in Europe to the ECB's balance sheet and,…