Another fine essay from Dmitry Orlov: The future does not resemble the past – or does it? When the lights go out, people burn candles and oil lamps, just like they used to before the electric grid came into existence. No longer accustomed to working with open flame, they tend to set things on fire, […]
From Calculated Risk: From The Times: Toxic debts could reach $4 trillion, IMF to warn Toxic debts racked up by banks and insurers could spiral to $4 trillion (£2.7 trillion), new forecasts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are set to suggest. The IMF said in January that it expected the deterioration in US-originated assets […]
By Michael J. Moore April 6 (Bloomberg) — CLSA analyst Mike Mayo assigned an “underweight” rating to U.S. banks, saying loan losses may exceed Great Depression levels and the government may be forced to take over large lenders. Financial shares and major U.S. stock indexes dropped after Mayo advised clients to sell shares of banks […]
By Brady Dennis, Washington Post Staff Writer The sea of new cars, 57,000 of them, stretches for acres along the Port of Baltimore. They are imports just in from foreign shores and exports waiting to ship out — Chryslers and Subarus, Fords and Hyundais, Mercedeses and Kias. But the customers who once bought them by […]
From Calculated Risk: This graph shows the job losses from the start of the employment recession, in percentage terms (as opposed to the number of jobs lost). For the current recession, employment peaked in December 2007, and this recession was a slow starter (in terms of job losses and declines in GDP). However job losses […]
From Calculated Risk: Here is a quick look at a few credit indicators: First, the British Bankers’ Association reported that the three-month dollar Libor rates were fixed at 1.166%. The LIBOR was at 1.30% a couple of weeks ago, and peaked at 4.81875% on Oct 10, 2008. This is near the January 14th low of […]
By DAVID STREITFELD MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. — Boat owners are abandoning ship. They often sandpaper over the names and file off the registry numbers, doing their best to render the boats, and themselves, untraceable. Then they casually ditch the vessels in the middle of busy harbors, beach them at low tide on the banks of […]
By SUSAN SAULNY …City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from […]
By John King BALLWIN, Missouri (CNN) — For Stuart and Dianne Falk, it is a two-bus, 45-minute trip into downtown St. Louis to head to the gym and to volunteer at a theater group. And it is a lifeline that ends Friday. "To be saddled, to be imprisoned, that is what it is going to […]
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. […]
