banks

I am sure you have seen the catastrophic financial results of Swiss bank UBS released this week. I have been saying for quite some time that UBS is too big to fail, but also too big to bail for tiny Switzerland. In my view, the recent…

Despite the fact that I can envisage a cyclical upturn this Winter, the menace of bank writedowns is ever-present. One analyst who has been particularly prescient on warning on this front is Mike Mayo, now working at Calyon. Below David…

We should consider Spain one of the four original bubble markets where residential property markets soared to ridiculous levels during the housing bubble.  The bubble has now popped and those countries, the U.K., the U.S., Ireland and…

Because I received a message via e-mail that my previous post on mark-to-market was misleading, I thought I would clarify what is happening with FAS 157 and provide some good links. The long and short of the rule is it gives more…

The OCC’s Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities for the Fourth Quarter 2008 is out. And derivatives exposure is way up. U.S. commercial banks now have a massive $200 trillion in derivatives exposure, which is 14x U.S.…

Of course you know I think credit cards are going to produce a tsunami of writedowns, right? Things are looking more and more like that tsunami is right around the corner: Credit card writedowns soared to record levels in February,…

This clip is very much in line with my thinking from a previous post.

The website You Walk Away has become pretty popular because it teaches mortgage holders how to dump their properties on banks and get out from under their mortgage without losing everything. Apparently, banks are getting into the act too…

Dunfermline, the largest uilding society in Scotland was forced into the hands of the Nationwide.  This happened only after the U.K. government was forced to pony up 1.6 billion pounds - not the best of news for Gordon Brown before a major…

Below is the video clip of U.S. Treasury Secretary defending his bailout plan which the likes of Paul Krugman have called "a plan to rearrange the deck chairs and hope that that keeps us from hitting the iceberg." The investors'…