Banks Freezing HELOCs (1); Big Rate Freeze (4); Europe Freezes (1); slowly freezing (1).
Sat 2010-07-24 16:03 EDT
European governments are turning their backs on Goldman Sachs, the all-conquering investment bank that has suffered a series of blows to its reputation, capped by the biggest ever fine imposed on a Wall Street firm. According to data from Dealogic, Greece, Spain, France and Italy have all denied the bank a lead role in their recent sovereign bond sales...
Credit Writedowns Sat 2010-05-22 20:55 EDT
...The cries of the deficit hawks grow louder: Repent all ye fiscal profligates, before the ``day of reckoning'' comes. Let's dial down the Biblical hysteria a wee bit while there's still time for rational debate. The market's recent response to the intensifying pressures in the euro zone suggests that investors are beginning to differentiate between countries that are sovereign issuers of currency, such as the US or Japan, and non-sovereign issuers, such as Greece or any other nations in the euro zone...That the US has the reserve currency is an irrelevant consideration here. The key distinction remains user vs. creator. The euro zone nations are part of the former; Canada, Australia, the UK, Japan and the US are representatives of the latter...Using ``PIIGS'' countries as analogues to the US or the UK, as Rogoff, Ferguson and countless other commentators do, is wrong. Their faulty analysis comes as a result of the deficit critics' failure to distinguish between the monetary arrangements of sovereign and non-sovereign nations. Any sovereign government (none within the EMU enjoy that status any longer) can deal with a collapse in revenue and an increase in outlays from a financial perspective without invoking the sort of deadlocks that are now crippling the EMU zone...Trying to engineer a reduction in the deficit via austerity programs (or freezes or whatever else one might like to call them) at a time when private spending is still insufficient to maintain adequate real GDP growth is a recipe for disaster. It will increase the deficit...
Fri 2010-03-19 20:42 EDT
...It is now twenty-five years since the Reagan Administration eviscerated America's century-long tradition of antitrust enforcement. For a generation, big firms have enjoyed almost complete license to use brute economic force to grow only bigger. And so today we find ourselves in a world dominated by immense global oligopolies that every day further limit the flexibility of our economy and our personal freedom within it...what should concern us today even more is a mirror image of monopoly called ``monopsony.'' Monopsony arises when a firm captures the ability to dictate price to its suppliers, because the suppliers have no real choice other than to deal with that buyer. Not all oligopolists rely on the exercise of monopsony, but a large and growing contingent of today's largest firms are built to do just that...today we have one of the best illustrations of monopsony pricing power in economic history: Wal-Mart...Wal-Mart has grown so powerful that it can turn even its largest suppliers, and entire oligopolized industries, into extensions of itself...the firm is also one of the world's most intrusive, jealous, fastidious micromanagers, and its aim is nothing less than to remake entirely how its suppliers do business, not least so that it can shift many of its own costs of doing business onto them. In addition to dictating what price its suppliers must accept, Wal-Mart also dictates how they package their products, how they ship those products, and how they gather and process information on the movement of those products...Rather than speed up the random motion and serendipitous collisions that have for so long propelled the American economy, Wal-Mart and other monopsonists are slowly freezing our economy into an ever more rigid crystal that holds each of us ever more tightly in place, and that every day is more liable to collapse from some sudden shock. To defend Wal-Mart for its low prices is to claim that the most perfect form of economic organization more closely resembles the Soviet Union in 1950 than twentieth-century America...
Fri 2008-03-21 00:00 EDT
Tue 2007-12-11 00:00 EST
by Sean Olender
avert suits; Bankers pay lip service; family; fraud; freeze; interest-rate; mortgage meltdown; prisoners; real story; scurrying.
Mon 2007-12-10 00:00 EST
Fri 2007-12-07 00:00 EST
Bear In Mind > The Big Rate Freeze: Good or bad for MBS? traditional NPV analysis modification versus foreclosure to be disregarded in favor of fast track loan modifications
Fri 2007-12-07 00:00 EST
Bear In Mind > The Big Rate Freeze: Much ado about nothing?
Ado; Bear; Big Rate Freeze; mind.
