banks

I can no longer say that not a single senior executive of one of the major nonprime lenders whose frauds hyper-inflated the housing bubble and caused the Great Recession has been convicted of his frauds. A single senior executive of one of…

Here's the question: Can sovereignty and effective international supervision be reconciled when it comes to complex large financial institutions? Simon Johnson lays out a compelling case that they cannot. As he has said time and again,…

Over the last three decades the US financial sector has grown six times faster than nominal GDP. This column argues that there comes a point when the financial sector has a negative effect on growth – that is, when credit to the private…

It is one of the paradoxes of life that the most practical means to ensure that the system does not collapse is to insist on justice for all and to ignore demands for special treatment premised on claims that justice places the system at…

Moody's, the rating agency, has cut the credit rating for the Republic of Ireland two notches from Baa1 to Baa3, which is the lowest investment grade rating. They also left the outlook for further rate cuts as negative, meaning that more…

The Vickers report came out in Britain identifying areas where Britain's banking system needed to alter its regulatory structure. Simon Johnson talked to Bloomberg about this report and banking regulation in general. His view is that first…

You have seen a few of these videos on ghost malls and ghost cities in China. This one from an Australian broadcast is quite good. It reinforces what I have been saying about the magnitude of non-performing loans and how this constrains…

The vote reflected widespread belief that government negotiators had not been vigorous in pleading Iceland’s legal case. The situation is reminiscent of World War I’s Inter-Ally war debt tangle. Lloyd George described the negotiations…

A year ago, in March 2010, Iceland’s economy was so small that it did not warrant much attention when 93% of its voters rejected the Social Democratic-Green government’s surrender to demands by Gordon Brown and the Dutch, the European Union…

By Michael Pettis I just got back from a very interesting but hectic week in New York and Washington, followed by two days at a conference in Hangzhou. During my meetings I noticed that much of the discussion, and many of the questions I…