capital

Wray’s view: Banks are bigger than before the crisis. But, despite their books showing profits, it is not clear if they are adequately reserving for loans and liabilities already on their balance sheets. The right approach is to actually…

You should notice that the title of this post is “make accounting gains” instead of “earned” because it is not clear at all that US banks earned $29 billion. After all, the FDIC has indicated that these accounting gains are driven by lower…

As James Galbraith has argued, the problem is said to be no more serious than some clogged plumbing. A bit of Drano in the form of government handouts and guarantees should be sufficient to get credit flowing again. Nonsense. Private debt…

Banks are never constrained by reserves or reserve ratios. Banks are capital constrained. In our fiat money system, the central bank uses reserves in the system to help the Federal hit a target interest rate. So, the central bank provides…

Below is a PDF copy of the Portuguese Memorandum of Understanding for the EU - IMF bailout. Portuguese interest rates have fallen somewhat on the news of the bailout, to the lowest levels in fifth months.

The global crisis has called into question how banks are run and how they should be regulated. Highly leveraged banks went under, threatening to drag down the entire financial system with them. Here, David Miles of the Bank of England’s…

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…

I was on Business News Network with Rob Cox of Reuters Breakingviews yesterday. We were talking to Howard Green about all things economic. The video clip is linked below. But let me say a few words about the discussion. One of the two…

I was on CNBC's Power Lunch yesterday talking about European debt markets in the wake of the Irish stress tests. I certainly think the Irish stress tests were a significant event. But the Euro Crisis is really all about Spain.

The results of the Irish stress tests are going to be released this afternoon at 430PM Irish time. I will be talking about the implications for investors in European markets on CNBC's Power Lunch show. I think one has to be cautious…