Credit Writedowns (www.creditwritedowns.com) is a news and opinion site dedicated to bringing a well-informed view of finance, economics, markets and all relevant global events into the global mainstream consciousness.
The site started in March 2008 and has become one of the highest-ranked economics and finance blogs on the net (now in the top 25 by traffic). [...]

When the going gets tough, the tough turn into populists. Or at least that’s what we have seen time and again throughout history. In the 1930s, as the Great Depression was savaging the American Economy, people trembled in fear at the economic devastation. Members of Congress, sensing they needed to do something [...]

Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic 1984 Vice Presidential Candidate and a major supporter of Hillary Clinton in this election, has said some very ugly things about Barack Obama. She is quoted as saying:
“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he [...]

So, first, there was the whole Commander-in-Chief nonsense. Hillary Clinton and her surrogates essentially claimed Obama had little more to offer America as President than a 2002 speech against the War in Iraq. At the same time, she praised the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain for his “years of experience.” Those comments got a [...]

Edward
I am a former European credit markets and M&A guy who started out as a diplomat. — so I have some pretty diverse interests.
The official line is that I am a banking and finance specialist at the economic consultancy Global Macro Advisors focusing on global economics and corporate strategy. Previously, I held positions at [...]

Back on Mar. 7th, I thought that Hillary Clinton had recently displayed such moral turpitude in her attempt to best Barack Obama in the Democratic primary contest that I couldn’t overlook it any more. That sentiment continues to grow
I would consider myself to be a middle-of-the-road voter, a Rockefeller Republican, a Libertarian — all [...]

Earlier today in the news, it was revealed that our top man in the military in the Middle East, William J. Fallon has asked to retire and resign from his post (see story)
This story may seem innocuous and of little to no consequence at a time of huge news coverage: Eliot Spitzer, Geraldine Ferraro, Barack [...]

This blog entry is an updated version of something I wrote way back in 2004. I wrote 90% of this 4 years ago when housing prices were much lower. The fact that I can re-publish this today, largely unchanged, demonstrates how the housing bubble has morphed into a giant of grotesque proportions.
The global [...]

We are already in recession by most accounts as I said on this blog yesterday. But, today I went back and looked at some of the historical employment data to see what the data said about Employment and recessions. What I was able to find out is that Employment is indeed a coincident to lagging indicator of recession.

The common layman’s definition of recession is two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth, meaning 6 months in which the economy contracts. But, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) uses the collective wisdom of its trusted economists on the Business Cycle Dating Committee to make a determination based on a number of factors.