COMMENTARY -- Why Are The Media Protecting Geithner?
By Cliff Kincaid -- The Obama Transition Project says that Timothy Geithner, its Chinese-speaking Treasury Secretary nominee, made "honest mistakes" on his tax returns. This line comes from the same group that is telling us that a nearly $1 trillion "stimulus" bill taking us further into debt can be called the "American Recovery and Reinvestment [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 13:35:32
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Top Stories and Blog Review - 8th Jan
Treasury: No Money Will Be Printed Nationwide Gurkhas decision delay criticised Why has MI5’s new chief gone public? How northern children top the happiness league Gaza conflict fuelling anger in UK, Muslims warn ... U.S. debt is losing its appeal in China Over 60,000 Bhutanese refugees want to resettle DAILY BLOG [more...]
Date: 2009-01-08 10:42:13
Wall Street bailout plan to include more than bad mortgage debt: Feds to absorb unpaid bar bets, inadvertently laundered postage stamps, unredeemed soda cans and insufficient tooth-fairy disbursements
Totally absurd? Think twice: In the dark of night over the weekend when most people were snoozing, the Treasury dramatically expanded its bailout plan to include buying student loans, car loans ... in draft language that also opened the bailout program to foreign banks with extensive loan operations [more...]
Date: 2008-09-23 06:05:06
Miracle TARP Can Cover Anything
The Treasury Department has agreed to buy a $5 billion stake in GMAC, General Motors' former financial subsidiary, to help it become a bank holding company. The money will come from the Troubled Asset Relief ... of its debt to equity. But that's hardly the most confusing part of the deal. GMAC, which loans money [more...]
Date: 2008-12-31 16:37:00
Hanging In There Ain’t Much Comfort When You’re Near the Top of The Range
Published this intro to the RevolutioNewsletter for subscribers on Monday…you can sign up to get these newsletter intro’s which I sometimes publish ... stocks, the best secular growers, the companies with no debt and tons of cash when (if) the market gets ... from the government paying off all the worthless contracts the company stupidly bought from AIG [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 12:20:19
Guest Post: Time to Recapitalize Banks Fully
As debate continues over the release of the second half of the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, Peter Boone and Simon Johnson argue that it’s time to stop taking half steps and make sweeping moves to fight bank insolvency. Boone is chairman of Effective Intervention, a U.K [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 11:47:00
Stimulus Bill Outlined By House Democrats as Senate Budget Sees a Wall of Debt
This morning, House Democratic leaders released summaries of the $275 b. of tax cuts and $550 b ... to stimulate the economy. The bulk of it paid down debt or was saved. Now we're trying again ... mortgage foreclosures and to clean "troubled" assets from bank balance sheets. Allen Sinai supported [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 22:04:23
Deals of the Day: Jamie Dimon Predicts Two More Quarters of Recession
Deals of the Day, compiled by Stephen Grocer and Heidi N. Moore, gathers all the biggest news of the morning related to mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies, financing and private equity. Deal Journal’s homepage is http://blogs.wsj.com/deals. You can also see real-time updates of our posts and our favorite deal-related articles on other Web [more...]
Date: 2009-01-13 15:28:00
Submerging Markets - Catching Down to the US
Let's take some time out from lamenting the dour economic news at home, the sense of betrayal we all feel by the collective gods of Wall Street, captains of industry and frauds of our country (Madoff, this means you), and take some solace in the fact that we're not the only ones who %&*(#@!^'d up royally [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 18:08:12
BofA?s Ken Lewis to Employees: ?This Extraordinary Period Has Called for Extraordinary Measures?
Deal Journal colleage Dan Fitzpatrick reports: Bank of America Corp., its stock hammered Thursday by its need for billions in federal aid to support its acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co., tried to rally its employees with a memo titled “Bank of America Remains Strong.” [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 16:23:00
Buy REO aka Lender Owned Real Estate
No, it’s not that REO! (wow, could a band look any cheesier? Buying REO (i.e. Real Estate Owned by a bank) does not always guarantee a great deal ... the foreclosure process and now owns it “free and clear” of any debt. That some, some banks ... - Residential and Commercial in Connecticut National City Mortgage - Residential Taylor Bean [more...]
Date: 2009-01-16 02:05:07
Richard John Neuhaus: Catholic Public Intellectual and Pastoral Evangelist
In 1984, when Richard John Neuhaus published The Naked Public Square, people of faith inspired by religious principles were in grave danger of being turned away from the table of public intellectual discourse. A secularist “hold on mainstream thinking,” as Michael McConnell would later describe it, [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 02:29:04
Fama's Fallacy, Take I: Eugene Fama Rederives the "Treasury View"
A Guestpost from Montagu Norman, former Governor of the Bank of England: Back in the 1920s and 1930s--in the days that overly-clever bisexual academic dilettante John Maynard Keynes was trying to persuade us that if only we got the government to spend more money the unemployment rate might go down--by far the silliest argument against his [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 16:29:37
Increasingly Desperate Arguments Against Student Loan Reform
Newsweek has published a mini-debate (the “Student Loan Smackdown”) between for-profit bank representative John Dean and myself, on the subject of whether Congress should pass President Obama’s plan to redirect $87 billion in lucrative subsidies for for-profit banks to Pell grants and other worthy causes. [more...]
Date: 2009-09-29 13:58:57
by Zahir Ebrahim featured writerDandelion SaladZahir’s blog postProject Humanbeingsfirst Jan ... . You have explained credit very well in your excellent book Web of Debt (and I am half-way through it), and so has Paul Grignon in his outstanding video Money as Debt. Please understand that “Thou Shall Not Kill” [more...]
Date: 2009-01-13 20:44:07
What I Would Do
My friend Dr. Jeff wrote in response to one of my articles: Jeff Says: December 21st, 20081: ... , and eliminates all tax preferences. Wind down the Fed’s current “solutions” Begin inflating the currency to force up the value of collateral relative to nominal debt levels [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 05:25:17
Do You Feel Stimulated?
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has released a draft of the proposed stimulus package that is now standing at around $825 billion. It didn’t take too long to grow $50 over what Obama was asking for (read draft here). Needless to say, that in order to get bi-partisanship off on the right foot, [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 22:54:11
The Dividend Dilemma
Obama said he will order the Treasury Department to limit dividends paid by commercial banks and investment banks that receive “exceptional assistance” from the government to “de minimis amounts”. That order will not likely receive any ... receiving “extensive assistance” and are also the primary sources of a large portion (perhaps [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 16:35:17
MortgageNewsClips: Is The Fed Done?, Awesome Map, AARP 625k HECM, Banks Hoarding?, Muni Market, Bernanke, Warming Up, Fed High Wire, PMI Report, Ira Has 3
VIDEO: Monetary Policy with Zero Interest Rates: Is the Fed Done? ... that banks are hoarding capital. There’s just one problem: they’re not. Gary Townsend explains ... paper - Data provider Dealogic says global sales of corporate debt surged to $82 billion last week [more...]
Date: 2009-01-16 01:21:57
Davis Polk Releases Comprehensive Review of Financial Crisis Laws
It has been my privilege to support my partners as the editor of Davis Polk’s recently issued Financial Crisis Manual , which has been written by 21 Davis Polk partners and counsel working in a collaborative team that is the hallmark of our firm culture. The Manual is a comprehensive review of financial crisis laws as they apply to US financial institutions. [more...]
Date: 2009-09-29 13:25:46
Saving Citi and BofA while ending the crisis
As Citigroup Inc. desperately tries to right its ship, Bank of America Corp ... , thanks to the Fed. The problem is one of solvency: the equity markets simply don't believe that the banks' assets are worth more than their liabilities. I can't see a solution to this problem short [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 19:55:23
Yahoo stock: Still not worth it
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is stepping down and Carol Bartz has taken the reins as the company's new CEO. Most hope that she can fix Yahoo and return it to the place of dominance it once enjoyed. Or failing that, at least move it back into favor with shareholders. This will be difficult [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 12:00:00
Five alternatives to 0% yield U.S. treasuries
By Xin Lu This week the 4 week T-bill rate was driven down to 0% and the demand for these treasuries was astounding ... with yields higher than 0%. The Fatwallet forums maintains a good list of the current rates ... above 2% and they are FDIC insured up to $250,000 per account. 4. Pay off debt - Instead of buying [more...]
Date: 2008-12-12 01:10:37
Premiers to press Harper for infrastructure boost
“We want to get those shovels in the ground sooner rather than later,” Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said. “We don’t want the recession to be over by the time we get infrastructure dollars spent.” Indeed, that would be disastrous. But, hey, money grows on trees, right? Spend away [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 20:12:27
Is Bank of America the Next “Citi”?
Is Bank of America the Next “Citi”? This morning Bank of America hit a new 52 week low, and traded at its lowest level since 1991 ... that help illustrate why humans make predictably irrational decisions. Ariely is the author ... , and the weaknesses in the credit rating agencies’ collateralized debt obligation (CDO) assumptions [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 15:42:49
The Baddest Bank in the West
Give us Madoff! Give us Madoff! "Oil rises to $39 on Bernanke comments..." "Asian stocks rise after Bernanke remarks..." When they turned out the lights and closed the doors in New York last night, the Dow had lost 25 points and oil had gone down to $37. But this morning, investors seem to be feeling better about things [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 04:51:36
Useful Advice - Can The Hope For Home Ownership Relief Act Really Help Homeowners Avoid Foreclosure?
My view on this bill is that it will be a dismal failure ... must be at least 31 percent; * They cannot afford their current loan; * They did not intentionally miss ... program include: * 30-year, fixed rate mortgage; * Maximum 90 percent loan-to-value ratio [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 16:06:21
Quango Irish Bank.
So, starting close to home, finally, it’s Anglo Irish Zero ... under its hood – you can’t pretend the bill isn’t yours – and, overnight, the Irish national debt ... encumber the State with a truly huge amount of total junk – the problem is that they're probably going [more...]
Date: 2009-01-16 02:21:50
BofA?s Ken Lewis to Employees: ?This Extraordinary Period has Called for Extraordinary Measures?
Deal Journal colleage Dan Fitzpatrick reports: Bank of America Corp., its stock hammered Thursday by its need for billions in federal aid to support its acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co., tried to rally its employees with a memo titled “Bank of America Remains Strong [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 16:23:00
"A Line in the Sand"
If you look on the sidebar, you will see a link to "Bailouts and Stimulus Plans - Fama/French Forum," at least until it rolls off the list ... ) CS , and government savings GS .... (1) PI = PS + CS + GS.... The problem is simple: bailouts and stimulus plans are funded by issuing more government debt.... The added debt absorbs savings [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 08:24:00
IMF Team Concludes Article IV Consultation Mission to the State of Eritrea
IMF Team Concludes Article IV Consultation Mission to the State of Eritrea ASMARA, Eritrea September 29, 2009/African Press Organization (APO)/ — An International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission visited Eritrea during September 14–29, 2009 to conduct the 2009 Article IV consultation discussions. The last Article IV consultation was concluded in April 2008. The mission met with Mr. Ali, Minister of Energy and Mines, Mr. [more...]
Date: 2009-09-29 15:41:13
Who Says The Union Lost The SOCCD Trustee Elections?
During last November's trustee elections in the South Orange County Community College District, the issue was pretty clear cut: ... Fuentes and Lang won, the SOCCD Board of Trustees would preserve its conservative majority and continue the governance that has produced a community college district that is debt free.If the union [more...]
Date: 2009-01-14 17:34:56
Optimal Fiscal Policy with a Liquidity Trap and Gridlock
Robert WaldmannI'm still thinking about Krugman's excellent little model which gives the very clear result that optimal macro policy implies that ... for Government consumption (G) sooner or later so they don't count the federal debt as part of their net [more...]
Date: 2009-01-13 10:19:00
EuroDollar Futures Selling Off
A: Taking a step back from Manhattan real estate for a moment, I want to point something out ... to accurately hedge LIBOR swaps and other market instruments such as mortgage market debt. The correlation with mortgage market debt is extremely high, higher [more...]
Date: 2009-01-14 16:02:25
Credit Crisis Watch: Gaining Positive Traction
In order to gauge the progress being made to unclog credit markets and restore confidence in the world’s financial system, I monitor a range of financial spreads and other measures. By perusing these, as summarized in this “Credit Crisis Watch” review, [more...]
Date: 2009-01-14 13:30:49
Dandelion SaladBy Mike Whitney January 16, 2009 “Information Clearinghouse“There’s no guarantee that Obama’s stimulus package will work, but there is growing consensus that something has to be done…and fast! The economy is contracting faster than anytime since the 1930s [more...]
Date: 2009-01-16 02:25:29
Global Development Prominent in Clinton Confirmation Hearing
Development was a prominent theme in Tuesday's Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of State-designate. Hillary Rodham Clinton mentioned “development assistance" or "development aid" roughly three times more than outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did during her confirmation hearing in January 2005 [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 17:43:54
Credit Crunching: A Chart of the Debt Markets Since Bear Stearns Fell
The credit crunch may be over temporarily, but it is certainly not forgotten ... , the only ones with access to the markets were investment-grade companies and agency debt ... . At Deal Journal’s request, Thomson Reuters provided a colorful chart tracking what the debt [more...]
Date: 2009-01-12 20:44:00
What Should Be Done With The Next $350 Billion of Taxpayer Bailout Money: Criteria for TARP II
It’s difficult to make the case that the first $350 billion bailout of Wall Street — so-called “TARP I” — fulfilled its goals, ... of board meetings at which they obviously didn’t oversee very much); to some holders of bank debt [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 15:54:46
Why Government Interaction is Ruining the Marketplace
In a deal that was set to finalize at the turn of the year, ... . Unfortunately, throwing money at the problem du jour, is the wrong solution. Rather than deal ... the government has made to this point has been to purchase $600 billion in debt and mortgage-backed [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 16:19:33
Still Crazy After All Last Year
Rob Curran reports: This year may not be as rough a year on the stock market as 2008, but traders on the options market are steeling themselves for something about as half as bad ... Jones Industrial Average is off by 6% for 2009, about as bad a start to the year as 2008. Equity [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 11:15:00
Murder and Mystery
In today's Times Rog Cohen explains that he hopes Obama will be guided by a mystically prophetic pig. He wants "magical realism ... are deluged in debt. Confidence has been Madoffed.That’s the realism. But this 47-year-old man of mixed [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 15:24:00
Asia largely Offline for Holidays: Cenbank Treasuries & Agencies Barely Move
The Twists are old Asia hands, and they remind me that, for whatever reason, ... that this is the first week in 14 that foreign central banks actually had a net buy of Agency Debt ... , a number even smaller than that for Agency Debt and so tiny compared to recent moves it hardly [more...]
Date: 2009-01-09 07:01:09
Economic Jihad: $700 Billion Bail-Out Aids Oil Rich Arab Sheikhs
ByPaul L. Williams(author of The Day of Islam) Oh, you Muslims everywhere, sever the ties of their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, ... that has been spent under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The megabank, thus far, has received [more...]
Date: 2009-01-14 02:37:00
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News
Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. Citigroup (C) and Morgan Stanley (MS) confirmed they're merging their wealth management units into Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. Morgan will pay $2.7B for a 51% stake with the option of taking full control after five years. Citi will book a pre-tax gain of $9.5B, and an after-tax gain of $5.8B [more...]
Date: 2009-01-14 12:15:31
Social Mood Will Define The Future
Boomers have known only inflationary or reflationary conditions for most, if not all of their conscious lives ... For Bernanke.Greenspan had the wind of consumers' willingness and ability to go deeper in debt at his back [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 17:23:00
Wednesday morning links
#fullpost{display:inline;}TOP STORIESRetail sales slump 2 ... to Sell Debt as Losses Erode Funds - BloombergPension Losses Could Whack 2009 Corporate Profits ... recycling - Christian Science MonitorSome States in a Pinch May Raise Gasoline Tax - NY [more...]
Date: 2009-01-14 14:02:00
What Should Be Done With The Next $350 Billion of Taxpayer Bailout Money: Criteria for TARP II
It's difficult to make the case that the first $350 billion bailout of Wall Street -- so-called "TARP I" -- fulfilled its goals, ... of board meetings at which they obviously didn't oversee very much); to some holders of bank debt [more...]
Date: 2009-01-15 15:20:01
Treasury bid to halt rent-back evictions
Owen and Moira Martin are among the many British victims of companies offering controversial sale-and-rent-back deals ... agreement to pay off about £26,000 of mainly credit card debt. 'My wife had a heart attack on my 50th [more...]
Date: 2008-11-09 00:04:48
Media Digest 1/12/2009 Reuters, WSJ, NYTimes, FT, Bloomberg
According to Reuters, Citigroup (C) is near a deal to form a venture putting its brokerage business together with the one at Morgan ... reports that the UK and its major banks are working on a deal so that firms can dump bad debt. The Wall [more...]
Date: 2009-01-12 09:07:45
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