Tue 2008-08-26 00:00 EDT
The Credit Default Swap Market - Will It Unravel?
by Satyajit Das (Prudent Bear); 2008-03-04; "CDS contracts may create incentives for creditors to push troubled companies into bankruptcy"
Prudent Bear Topic in The Credit Debacle Catalog
indispensable chronicler Prudent Bear Doug Noland (1).
Tue 2008-08-26 00:00 EDT
The End of the Beginning -- Developments in the Credit Crisis
The End of the Beginning - Developments in the Credit Crisis, by Satyajit Das (Prudent Bear); 2008-05-27; ``limited recognition of the massive de-leveraging of the global financial system that is under way.'' ``The banking systems ability to supply credit is significantly impaired and will remain so for the foreseeable future.'' ``Changes in financial markets will have a significant impact on many companies that now rely on financial engineering rather than real engineering'' Das proposes: ``holdings and values of risky assets held by banks and investment banks must be accurately determined...Risky assets must be valued on a hold-to-maturity basis...Mark-to-market accounting should be suspended...Capital levels should be set on a bank-by-bank basis by regulators...Capital requirements should be eased...government [should] guarantee of all major bank liabilities''
Sun 2008-08-24 00:00 EDT
Guest Commentary
The Great Consumer Crash of 2009, by James Quinn (Prudent Bear); ``the tremendous prosperity that began during the Reagan years of the early 1980s has been a false prosperity built upon easy credit''; ``We have outsourced our savings to the emerging economies, along with our manufacturing jobs.'' ``the gathering storm has arrived. It will be long, painful and destructive.''
Sun 2008-08-24 00:00 EDT
Here comes the downsizing of finance
by Martin Hutchinson (Prudent Bear); auction-rate securities (ARS); credit default swaps (CDS); ``CDS market creates many times as much risk as it hedges or transfers''; GSEs ``leveraged more than would have been possible without the governments quasi-guarantee, lobbied like to crazy to ensure they were not properly regulated and collapsed thankfully into the arms of the taxpayer as soon as ill winds began to blow...by their presence they turned the soundest product in financial markets, the home mortgage, into an obscene speculative casino, causing collateral damage of many times their own losses.'' ``much of the financial services innovation of the last generation was spurious and unsound, and needs to be done away with''
Sun 2008-08-24 00:00 EDT
The return of global inflation
by Martin Hutchinson (Prudent Bear); "Almost all the world has abandoned proper anti-inflationary discipline and is destined to suffer a period of high inflation and recession in the coming years...Only a few countries like Brazil have taken the inflationary threat sufficiently seriously and will thus be in a position to continue expanding even while the rest of the world endures recession"