ShareFrom the Wall Street Journal: Florida Sues Countrywide

The Florida attorney general has filed a lawsuit against Countrywide Financial Corp. and its chief executive, Angelo Mozilo, alleging that the company engaged in deceptive and unfair trade practices.

The lawsuit, filed on Monday in state court in Broward County by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, alleges that [...]

ShareThe following are the links regarding the global credit crunch that have been recently added to the Credit Crisis Timeline. The full timeline is accessible here
Latest Additions2008 06 18 Subprime Losses Top $396 Billion on Brokers’ Writedowns: Table2008 06 18 Paulson & Co. Says Writedowns May Reach $1.3 Trillion2008 06 19 HBOS writes off £1bn [...]

Bill Gross, Pimco’s founder and Chief Inestment Strategist is bold. In the past, he has argued for extreme measures to bailout subprime, questioned the CPI and said a lot more over the past few years. Now he’s calling for a President Obama to crank up the government juice and spend like mad. Gross is calling for a $1 trillion deficit.

ShareThe Vancouver Sun is on a roll today. They have another post on ICBC that makes for interesting reading. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of it. But it makes for a good read.
Chinese bank has market cap twice that of JPMorgan
First, the article starts off stating that the head of [...]

ShareI am firmly in the deflation camp. I worry about inflation over the short-term, but I still think the long-term threat to the global economy is deflation because asset price deflation will usher in deflationary forces. Nevertheless, there are valid arguments to both sides of the debate and a great article in the [...]

ShareI ran a short poll over the last week and the results are in. Readers at Credit Writedowns expect house prices in the U.S. to fall well in excess of 30%.
From where I sit, this makes a lot of sense (I voted too: for a 30-50% fall). If one looks at [...]

As we prepare for another week in the markets, it bears remembering that Bear markets are not an orgy of pain with indices going straight down. Along the way, there are always brief rallies which bring optimism that the worst is over. But, the indices then resume their downtrend until capitulation is reached and almost everyone is bearish.

ShareAmbrose Evans-Pritchard writes in today’s Telegraph of the BIS annual report, which is unusually cautious about the global economy. His article makes for sobering reading.
Bill White, the departing chief economist at the BIS, in writing his last annual report before departure. has warned that this financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression [...]

ShareIn this weeks Barron’s, Louise Yamada writes that financials in the U.S. have not fallen nearly enough in respect to their meteoric rise in the U.S. indices. She predicts further pain in the sector to where they represent less than a double-digit percentage of the S&P 500. I am certainly bearish on financials [...]

SharePeter Schiff, the investor and author, is a controversial figure. He tells of an America that has lost its way through shedding manufacturing and its habit of saving money. His conclusion is that the U.S. is not a place where he wants his clients to be invested and he has many places to [...]