crisis

Hank Paulson may have created a monster. He has recently said that he does not want to use the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) to buy dodgy assets as he originally billed the U.S. bailout measure. Instead, he wants to inject cash…

This chart and the commentary both come from FT Alphaville: A look at the Fed's balance sheet currently will tell you it's very much in the business of supporting liquidity/prices in assets other than Treasuries. The graph below is a…

Here in Washington, DC, we are preparing for the G-20 summit, the largest gathering of foreign leaders in this own since the 50th anniversary of NATO in 1999. The event has been billed as a latter-day Bretton Woods, a forum to reform the…

The big news this week is that writedowns have moved near trillion dollar territory. As all of the banks report earnings and come clean about losses, the figures are staggering. The largest writedowns came from the GSEs with Fannie Mae…

Jon Danielsson has a very thorough piece up on the VoxEU site which details the catastrophic collapse of Iceland and its banking system. This is a cautionary tale on two fronts. First, Iceland was a small country with a very large…

Many will suffer at the hands of Lehman Brothers. That is the verdict by white-shoe law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz - a firm I had the pleasure of working with during my previous life in finance. They are very good.…

The stars are aligned for the big three automakers because everyone is coming out in their favor. First, we heard that they were meeting with congressional leaders on Capitol Hill. Then, we heard that Rahm Emanuel, a house democrat and…

Last night an article by Niels Jensen of Absolute Return Partners caught my eye. In it, he made a very strong case for worrying about European bank exposure to emerging markets and its potential for creating systemic risk. I would like to…

The United States Government's bailout of the financial sector is approaching breathtaking proportions. There are so many pronouncements and announcements of this monetary stimulus and that loan of this preferred equity stake and that…

The U.S. government is throwing money at the financial sector like nobody's business. The latest salvo in this ridiculous affair comes in the form of more money for AIG. Rather than prattle on about how shambolic the U.S. bailout has…