Minyanville Fri 2010-07-16 14:43 EDT

Intel Shows the 'Financialization' of Corporate America

Peter Atwater

To quote the company's own earnings headline: "Intel Reports Best Quarter Ever."While not taking anything away from the company's ability to deliver I'd strongly encourage readers to look at Intel's (INTC) balance sheet. To these eyes it's filled with financial assets...few have paid attention to what I term the "financialization" of corporate balance sheets, in which productive manufacturing assets have been increasingly replaced by various financial instruments, derivatives, and goodwill...because so much of corporate balance-sheet space is now a function of credit and market risk, financialization has created much tighter correlations to financial institutions than many currently think...And with corporate balance sheets more and more laden with financial instruments, it isn't just going to be product innovation that drives what earnings are ahead for companies like Intel.

Corporate America; Financial; Intel shows; Minyanville.

zero hedge Thu 2010-05-20 15:41 EDT

Perspectives From Rosenberg On Hyperinflation As A Loss Of Faith In A Currency

In today's note by David Rosenberg, the economist quotes a reader letter which provides a unique perspective on how hyperinflation arises: ...Where I disagree is that you can't have inflation with such a significant slack in the economy. For those of us that lived or worked in the hyperinflationary South American zone of the seventies and eighties, inflation comes when people lose faith in the currency and see material goods as a store of value. Because commodities rise and the goods can no longer be expected to be made at the same cost structure, people assume that they will be worth more in the future creating a self fulfilling upward spiraling effect. You can anticipate that these state governments will introduce price controls as well as potentially fixing exchange rates worsening the situation...

currency; Faithful; Hyperinflation; losses; perspective; Rosenberg; Zero Hedge.

Jesse's Café Américain Wed 2010-05-05 16:22 EDT

Market Manipulation, Systemic Risk and Fraud, Pure and Simple, And It Continues Today

Jesse

This article by the Financial Times should remove any doubt in anyone's mind that Goldman Sachs was willfully selling fraudulent financial instruments. It appears that they were working in conjunction with Ratings Agencies, Mortgage Origination Firms, and Hedge Funds to cheat investors...Tom Montag, then a senior Goldman executive and now head of corporate and investment banking at Bank of America, was quoted as describing the deal in an e-mail as follows: ``Boy that timeberwof (sic) was one shi**y (sic) deal,'' according to the Senate subcommittee...Within five months of issuance, Timberwolf lost 80 per cent of its value...

continued; fraud; Jesse's Café Américain; Market Manipulation; Pure; simple; systemic risk.

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis Tue 2010-03-09 17:27 EST

Short Selling Restrictions "A Great Indicator of Imminent Market Crashes"

Michael Shedlock

...The Securities and Exchange Commission voted on Wednesday to limit short-selling of stocks that are falling rapidly in price...[quoting friend HB:] "Short selling restrictions are a great indicator of imminent market crashes. The biggest market declines in history all happened shortly after short selling restrictions were introduced."

great indicator; Imminent Market Crashes; Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis; short-selling restrictions.

Jesse's Café Américain Mon 2010-01-18 09:56 EST

Franklin Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address: A Fitting Reminder For Our Crisis Today

Jesse

...I never read it in full, but like most people just remember the famous quote about fear. It's worth reading this. It shows a mindset in terrible, overwhelming times that was determined to set things right, not to take care of business, but to address the business of the people directly, and not only the immediate concerns of the crisis but the long term problems that caused the financial collapse in meaningful ways...

Crisis; fitting reminder; Franklin Roosevelt's; inaugural addresses; Jesse's Café Américain.

zero hedge Fri 2009-12-18 13:20 EST

Focusing On (And Profiting From) The Upcoming Chinese Financial Crisis

Today's piece of contrarian economic insight comes once again from the strategists at SocGen, this time Dylan Grice, whose piece entitled "Popular Delusions: China's looming financial crisis will provide the next buying opportunity" is somewhat self explanatory. Not surprisingly, Dylan, who quotes the NBER, focuses on the overabundance of cheap credit as the catalyst that will ultimately topple the economy. Mr. Grice's conclusion: buy if you must, but wait for the credit bubble pop.

focused; profits; Upcoming Chinese Financial Crisis; Zero Hedge.

naked capitalism Wed 2009-12-16 15:18 EST

Hosptial Cleaners Are Worth More Than Bankers (and Quelle Surprise, Bankers Destroy Value!)

A provocative report by the New Economics Foundation has made an effort to put a price tag on the broader costs and benefits of various types of work. As quoted in the Financial Times...The authors assume the financial crisis and recession would not have happened without City bankers engaging in risky, opaque and complex transactions. Applying a guess about the cost of the recession on the rest of society, they estimate top City bankers des-troy £7 of value for every £1 they are paid privately.

bankers; Bankers Destroy Value; Hosptial Cleaners; naked capitalism; Quelle Surprise.

Jesse's Café Américain Fri 2009-10-23 19:27 EDT

Matt Taibbi: Wall Street's Naked Swindle

Jesse

This is worth reading. Wall Street's Naked Swindle by Matt Taibbi. Closing quote from this story: "The new president for whom we all had such high hopes went and hired Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2 million bonus after he joined the White House, to serve on his economic transition team -- at the same time the government was giving Citigroup a massive bailout. Then, after promising to curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite, Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets. He handed control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke, a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers being bellhops for...

Jesse's Café Américain; Matt Taibbi; Wall Street's Naked Swindle.

Calculated Risk Mon 2009-10-12 09:56 EDT

More on Problems at the FHA and Quote of the Day

CalculatedRisk

``I don't think it's a bad thing that the bad loans occurred. It was an effort to keep prices from falling too fast. That's a policy.'' Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee on recent FHA lending.The quote is from David Streitfeld and Louise Story's article in the NY Times: U.S. Mortgage Backer May Need Bailout, Experts Say

Calculated Risk; day; FHA; problem; quote.

Bank-Implode! Sun 2009-09-20 12:22 EDT

Bank-Implode! >> Blog Archive >> Exclusive -- Wells Fargo's Commercial Portfolio is a ticking time bomb

In order to sort through the disaster that is Wells Fargo's (quote: WFC) commercial loan portfolio, the bank has hired help from outside experts to pour over the books... and they are shocked with what they are seeing. Not only do the bank's outstanding commercial loans collectively exceed the property values to which they are attached, but derivative trades leftover from its acquisition of Wachovia are creating another set of problems for the already beleaguered San Francisco-based megabank...According to sources currently working out these loans at Wells Fargo, when selling tranches of commercial mortgage-backed securities below the super senior tranche, Wachovia promised to pay the buyer's risk premium by writing credit default swap contracts against these subordinate bonds...should the junior tranches eventually default, then the bank is on the hook.

bank implode; blogs Archive; exclusive; ticking time bomb; Wells Fargo's commercial portfolio.

Minyanville Sun 2009-09-20 11:17 EDT

Our Marionette Economy

This morning in the Wall Street Journal Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf is quoted saying ``If it's not a government program it's basically not getting done.'' While Stumpf's comment was targeted to the mortgage market and associated with a plea for Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) to raise their size limits so as to be able to pick up more jumbo mortgages I believe he nailed the current state of our economy: ``If it's not a government program it's basically not getting done.''...But to me, there's a fundamental flaw to the notion that the government can create a sustainable economic recovery...I kept coming back to a comment from Bennet Sedacca: ``They (the government) can make 'em bounce, but they can't make 'em fly.''

Marionette Economy; Minyanville.

naked capitalism Tue 2009-09-08 15:19 EDT

Links 9/8/09

DownSouth tellingly quotes Hannah Arendt and paraphrases Reinhold Niebuhr on economic growth and progress.

Links 9/8/09; naked capitalism.

naked capitalism Tue 2009-09-01 13:10 EDT

Twenty-Five Years to Work Off the Debt Overhang?

T. S. Eliot was right. Human beings cannot stand very much reality. As much as I have an appetite for bearish views (I figure the optimist case gets disproportionate air time), the headline of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's latest piece, ``Our quarter-century penance is just starting,'' is grim even by the standards of the bearish faithful. Great comment by DownSouth, quoting Martin Luther King and Reinhold Niebuhr to the effect that by delegating to elites what should be the role of labor unions and grass-roots organizations. Niebuhr wrote: ``when collective power, whether in the form of imperialism or class domination, exploits weakness, it can never be dislodged unless power is raised against it'' ``Before we can fix the economy, the polity must be repaired first.''

debt overhang; naked capitalism; working; years.

Fri 2009-07-24 00:00 EDT

naked capitalism: Guest Post: Supercop or Superflop?

SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro; DownSouth quotes Niebuhr, Kevin Phillips

Guest Post; naked capitalism; supercop; Superflop.

Tue 2009-04-21 00:00 EDT

Newsweek's Fearful Krugman Profile - Finance Blog - Ryan Avent - Market Movers - Portfolio.com

by Felix Salmon; ``No one is quoted saying a single nice thing about Krugman's economics or his opinions.''

com; financing blog; Market Movers; Newsweek's Fearful Krugman Profile; portfolio; Ryan Avent.

Tue 2009-02-24 00:00 EST

naked capitalism: Quote of the Week

from Jesse: ``Adding liquidity to the banks is as useful as filling the tank of a car wrapped around a telephone pole''

naked capitalism; quote; weekly.

Thu 2009-01-15 00:00 EST

AlterNet: The Best and the Brightest Have Led America Off a Cliff

by Chris Hedges; William Deresiewicz quoted

AlterNet; best; brightest; cliff; Led America.

Thu 2008-08-21 00:00 EDT

INO - US DOLLAR INDEX (NYBOT:DX) Price Chart and Quote

INO - U.S $ INDEX (NYBOT:DX) Price Chart and Quote; US dollar index; USD FX

Dollar Index; DX; iNOS; NYBOT; price charting; quote.

Sun 2008-07-06 00:00 EDT

naked capitalism: Hoisted From Comments: Has Neo-Liberalism Failed to Deliver the Goods?

good comment discussion; interesting Australian perspectives; great Carlos Fuentes quotes

Comments; delivered; good; Hoisted; naked capitalism; Neo-liberalism Fails.

Thu 2008-04-03 00:00 EDT

Winter (Economic & Market) Watch >> Ben Bernanke, Winker and Risklove Third Class

Winter (Economic & Market) Watch >> Ben Bernanke, Winker and Risklove Third Class; Andrew Jackson "vipers and thieves" quote

Ben Bernanke; classes; economic; Market; Riskloves; watch; winker; winter.

Fri 2007-09-07 00:00 EDT

INO - US DOLLAR INDEX (NYBOT:DX) Price Chart and Quote

INO - U.S $ INDEX (NYBOT:DX) Price Chart and Quote

Dollar Index; DX; iNOS; NYBOT; price charting; quote.

Tue 2007-08-28 00:00 EDT

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis: Quotes of the Day / Top Call

2007-07-10; Mish calls equity top!

day; Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis; quote; Tops called.

Thu 2004-04-08 00:00 EDT

NYMEX Henry Hub Natural Gas

Futures Quotes and Market Prices

NYMEX Henry Hub Natural Gas.