Willem Buiter

YouTube - Pig Slop Processor A friend of mine sent me this link. It has nothing to do with finance, but it was so good I had to post it. WARNING: don't watch this while eating. The Banks and Orwell - Yves Smith This post…

From the London School of Economics website: Below is an audio recording of approximately 78 minutes where Gillian Tett takes us inside the shadowy world of complex finance and derivatives and explains how the business of slicing and…

Berkshire’s Munger Favors ‘100% Ban’ on Credit Swaps - Bloomberg.com Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Vice Chairman Charles Munger said he supports an outright ban of credit- default swaps to prevent speculators from profiting on the failure of…

I have grown pretty frustrated with FeedBurner, the RSS Feed Service now owned by Google.  Often, my posts have not  gone out immediately. There are significant 'outages' where the service is just plain broken.  And their Feed count…

Holdouts Jeopardize Debt Plan for Chrysler - DealBook Blog - NYTimes.com You sorta knew this was coming: "some smaller banks and hedge funds are still balking at the terms, setting the stage for a tense final two days in which the fate…

FT.com - German business confidence rebounds A surprisingly sharp rise in German business confidence has provided further evidence that Europe’s largest economy is over the worst of its recession and is closer to returning to growth…

Raghuram Rajan Speaks at 2009 Homer Jones Lecture - St. Louis Fed Financial institutions considered "too big to fail" could be asked to develop a bankruptcy contingency plan that would lay out how they would resolve themselves quickly.…

This past Sunday Felix Salmon wrote a post called "10 reasons for the lack of German econobloggers." I found it inaccurate and offensive. Let me tell you why. I was in Germany at the time I read the post and had been there for the…

FT Alphaville - The world’s 50 ’safest’ banks UBS as one of the safest? rubbish. Japan suffers first trade deficit since 1980 - guardian.co.uk Exports fell 16.4% last year to ¥71.1 trillion as makers of consumer electronics and…

BBC NEWS - Detroit's long road to ruinThis is a fairly good look at what Detroit faces for itself, its schools and its citizens. Very sobering. Jesse's Café Américain: Break The Big Banks Up, and Let the Insolvent Parts FailThis will…