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In a move widely anticipated for months by many analysts, Meredith Whitney amongst others, Bank of America has finally cut its dividend. Releasing its earning report two weeks early, BofA said it would cut the dividend 50%. I view the move as much needed because BofA needs to start husbanding cash in order [...]

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Here are five books you will NOT find me touting at the Credit Writedowns Amazon Store.

Dow, 30,000 by 2008: Why It’s Different This Time – Robert Zuccaro
Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market – James Glassman
Dow 40,000: Strategies for Profiting From the Greatest Bull Market in History [...]

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The markets are having a very bad day today. After we saw the Europeans were also vulnerable to this credit crisis, stock markets worldwide sold off, with many European markets seeing their largest drops since 1987. For Europe, today is as bad as last Monday’s 777 point fall was for the U.S.
Sectors being [...]

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In the Vice-Presidential debate, Sarah Palin, in one of her few unscripted moments, gave wholehearted support for Dick Cheney’s dangerous expansion of Vice Presidential power. Joe Biden vigourosly disagreed, calling Cheney “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history.” I have to agree with Biden.
Obviously, George Bush has been the [...]

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This is not a financial sector post but I find it shocking enough that eBay is cutting 10% of its workforce that I had to post this. Now, this could be as unrelated to the current economic malaise as Yahoo’s problems and rumored future job cuts are.
But, if high growth technology companies are [...]

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average has just fallen below 10,000 for the first time since 2004. Breaking through the 10,000 barrier was a huge deal on CNBC when we were partying like it was 1999, nine years ago.
Essentially, we are back to stock market levels that prevailed a decade ago — proof that we [...]

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Marshall Auerback sent me this picture from some treacherous highway. Kind of fitting.

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The Guardian is reporting that Gordon Brown and his Labour Government are increasingly on the defensive as the number of governments in Europe guaranteeing deposits increases.
The first problem for the Prime Minister was that Building societies started complaining that Irish banks were advertising their government guarantees to British savers in a way that engendered unfair [...]

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Germany has moved center stage in the credit crisis despite having not experienced a housing bubble in the run-up to the bust. Switzerland and Japan, along with Germany are three countries I find notable in not having participated in the upside. But with a full scale assault on the global financial system underway, [...]

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On the heels of weekend trouble at European banks, markets in Asia and Europe are selling off this morning. At the weekend, we learned that Hypo Real Estate, a finance behemoth in Germany with $700 billion in assets was feared to collapse. Later the German government rescued the bank and guaranteed all German private [...]