dimelab: Bank going Topic in The Credit Debacle Catalog at Feed-Adept

Bank going Topic in The Credit Debacle Catalog

000 banks go (1); banks going busted (1); let failed banks go (1).

Wed 2010-06-09 18:45 EDT

London business figures embroiled in Kaupthing fraud investigation: Serious Fraud Office team thought to be to be scrutinising Deutsche Bank's role in alleged suspect trades| Business | The Guardian

A Serious Fraud Office investigation into Kaupthing, the failed Icelandic bank, is understood to be pursuing a number of allegations of market manipulation involving investment vehicles controlled by some of the bank's largest clients, including several high profile UK business leaders. It is alleged that in the weeks and months before Iceland's financial system went into meltdown, certain trades improperly used at least €500m (£413m) of Kaupthing funds in an effort to manipulate credit derivatives. Bank bosses hoped this would restore crumbling confidence in Kaupthing's solvency in the months before the bank collapsed in October 2008...The effect was for investment vehicles -- financed by Kaupthing loans, and at least nominally controlled by some of the bank's largest clients -- to take on risk associated with the bank going bust. Kaupthing loans were being use to write insurance against Kaupthing bonds defaulting...Iceland's Truth Commission obtained details of emails sent by Deutsche Bank staff to Kaupthing which, according to its report, demonstrated that the German bank had been offering advice on how to influence the CDS price on Kaupthing bonds from early 2008...

alleged suspect trades; business; Guardian; Kaupthing fraud investigation; London business figures embroiled; scrutinising Deutsche Bank's role; Serious Fraud Office team thought.

THE PRAGMATIC CAPITALIST Wed 2010-02-10 11:22 EST

AN INSIDER'S VIEW OF THE REAL ESTATE TRAIN WRECK

TPC

The first time I spoke with real estate entrepreneur Andy Miller was in late 2007, when I asked him to serve on the faculty of a Casey Research Summit...what most intrigued me about Andy was that he had been almost alone among his peer group in foreseeing the coming end of the real estate bubble, and in liquidating essentially all of his considerable portfolio of projects near the top...he remains deeply concerned about the outlook for real estate...the United States home mortgage market has been nationalized without anybody noticing...If government support goes away, and it will go away, where will that leave the home market? It leaves you with a catastrophe...eventually the bond market is going to gag on the government-sponsored paper...commercial properties are not performing and that values have gone down, although I've got to tell you, the denial is still widespread, particularly in the United States and on the part of lenders sitting on and servicing all these real estate portfolios...The current volume of defaults is already alarming. And the volume of commercial real estate defaults is growing every month...When you hit that breaking point, unless there's some alternative in place, it's going to be a very hideous picture for the bond market and the banking system...second quarter 2010 is a guess...the FDIC and the Treasury Department have decided that rather than see 1,000 or 2,000 banks go under and then create another RTC to sift through all the bad assets, they'll let the banking system warehouse the bad assets. Their plan is to leave the assets in place, and then, when the market changes, let the banks deal with them. Now, that's horribly destructive...it's exactly a Japanese-style solution...The entire U.S. residential mortgage market has in effect been nationalized, but there wasn't any act of Congress, no screaming and shouting, no headlines in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times...That's a template for what they could do with the commercial loan market.

insider's view; pragmatic capitalists; Real Estate Train Wreck.

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis Wed 2009-11-25 12:05 EST

What Is Inflation and How Does One Measure It?

Michael Shedlock

...Inflation is a net expansion of money supply and credit, where credit is marked to market. Deflation is the opposite: a net contraction of money supply and credit, where credit is marked to market...Credit (and credit problems) dwarf monetary concerns at the present...I still expect the US to slip in and out of deflation and recession for years to come just as happened in Japan...banks aren't lending, consumer credit is contracting, credit writeoffs are likely to exceed monetary printing, and symptoms like treasury yields are in generally in agreement...To bail out the banks' poor bets on Dot-Com companies and Latin America in 2001-2002, Greenspan purposely ignited a credit bubble that led to the mother of all housing crashes. In response to the housing bust, the Fed refused to let failed banks go out of business and is attempting to force another credit bubble...However, this is the end of the line. Housing was the bubble of last resort, nothing can come close to the number of jobs created by the global housing bubble. Further attempts to reflate will do nothing but create a currency crisis, crash the economy, and add to future liabilities that cannot be paid back.

Inflation; measured; Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis.