Anyone who has been following the financial news knows that banks and other large financial institutions are under a growing amount of strain given the misguided investments in speculative ventures over the past 5 years, including mortgages and exotic credit / investment packages. While chasing down what state a company like Merrill-Lynch might be tough, […]
My stalwart co-blogger, Bruce Henderson, has been waving his arms here on ASIP for roughly two years now about the coming financial crisis, with a particular focus on the subprime fiasco. Well, here’s a link to a funny, scathing, profane, yet quite accurate presentation (using stick figures) on how we got into the subprime mess […]
Congress has just passed the president’s stimulus package, and the increase of the conforming loan limit to include some “Jumbo” loans is in it. Once again the ID credits go to Professor Kevin Depew at Minianville: Congress gave final approval Thursday night to an economic stimulus package that would send government payments to more than […]
A year ago there was a great deal of disagreement on this nation’s housing bubble, with the people invested long in real estate insisting that it was just “fair value” and that prices would continue ever higher, carrying those “wise” enough to get in at historically high costs to greater riches. To keen observers, the […]
For those of you who did not see the story on mortgages in last weekend’s 60 Minutes, they revealed America’s first glimpse at a trend that is a serious threat to our economy; people intentionally defaulting on their mortgages. This except is from Minyanville’s professor Kevin Depew’s Five Things You Need To Know: (my comments […]
I know that the president and the congress have been hard at work trying to perform some kind of economic defibrillation to make sure the US does not slide into recession. At present it looks like Uncle Sam is going to be handing out packages of “free money” to everyone in the country except rich […]
Asia markets are picking up again heavily on the down side, with the India down almost 10% at the moment. The Euros are predicting a start at last -3% down from yesterday’s bloodbath. At the moment the Dow futures are off 500 or so points, meaning at open it will be down 500 points immediately […]
Well, so much for containment! It seems that the banks in China were no smarter than the rest of the world, and became investors in the funny money structured investments backed up by questionable loans. From CNN Money: China’s banks feel subprime heat BEIJING (AP) — Shares in China’s banks fell sharply Monday after news […]
Found this on Eschaton: As Atrios said, this ad is “weird and disturbing for so many reasons.” I plan to do some investigation to find out whether Experian (“freecreditreport.com”) does indeed allow you to see other people’s credit report. ..bruce..
The Fed’s Mistakes – How Deep In It Now?
In a recent private discussion thread, one of the participants cited our current problems as a shortage of liquidity (available cash) brought on by failed sub-prime mortgage lending. We are not a liquidity crisis, but a debt crisis. The banks have some idea of how bad the problem really is, but most people don’t know […]
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