October 2008

For those of you who have been following things, you know we have had three panics since the credit crisis began. The first was in August 2007. The 2nd after Bear Stearns collapsed and the third was creeping up after IndyMac and the GSE…

Asian Market Losses Deepen - NYTimes.comAsian stock markets headed into another day of steep falls on Thursday, led by the Nikkei 225 index, which plunged more than 7 percent in morning trading.African free trade zone is agreedThe leaders…

I don't think that the market as a whole is going to go up rapidly or that another bull market will soon be underway (In fact, I think we are in a secular bear market and the inflation-adjusted lows are even further down). However, I do…

Today I added My News Feed to the blog's sidebar, so that anyone visiting the site can also see the news items that we post once daily as a part of my RSS Feed and Newsletter.The benefit of the feed and newsletter version is that all the…

Something dramatic is happening in the currency markets. I commented on this in my post "US Dollar rising dramatically." These currency moves are related to international dollar debt, the carry trade unwind and expected interest rate cuts…

The U.S. Dollar is rising once again. As the realization kicks in that the U.S. will not be alone in its economic struggles, currency traders are making major bets that interest rates will fall outside of the U.S. across the board. The…

I need a chance to vent about one company that just released earnings: Yahoo! I worked at Yahoo! for a number of years in a former life. It is a great brand and was a great company. But, the place has clearly been run into the…

While I am markedly more upbeat of late about economic matters, I still harbor some deep concerns about the direction of both the global economy and resultant political stability. The Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has summed…

Bloomberg's Lisa Kassenaar and Christine Harper have written a good, long article about Goldman Sachs, how it dealt with crisis, and what led the venerated firm to the brink of collapse despite being the best run firm on Wall Street.…

Writedowns continued unabated despite the easing global credit markets. While we should see a bear market rally due to this easing, the ill effects of a global recession and new concerns in emerging markets and Asia will cause writedowns…