November 2008

The tag line from the Obama campaign was "Change We Can Believe In." However, an increasing number of people are becoming skeptical as to whether Obama will actually change anything. I, for one, have always felt his cautious approach meant…

I caught a post today on the Swiss Blog Zeitenwende about Glencore, the Swiss corporate giant, which should reinforce the fact that this credit crisis is far from over. As the original post was in German, I have translated it into English…

Why not? Everyone else is getting something. Aegon, a Dutch company, is trying the same maneuver that Genworth Financial and Hartford, two American companies, are trying -- it's buying a small depositary institution. This will give it…

Just a few moments ago I caught a very interesting post on Alice Cook's site UK Bubble. The gist of the post was that things are falling apart in Ireland very quickly. Given what we saw with Iceland, I have to ask: is Ireland next? I…

The video below comes via the Daily Kos and YouTube.Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) has said that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) needs to publicly apologize for his actions during the recent U.S. Presidential Campaign in order to retain his seat as…

I am listening to the Congressional hearings with Sheila Bair, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke recounting what they have done to restore the economy with the $700 billion that Congress gave the Bush Administration. The hearing is pretty…

The headline story is that this is the largest month-to-month fall ever since monthly statistics began for this data series in 1947. But, as you can see from the chart below, all of this decline was due to food and energy. Therefore, the…

Greetings and happy Tuesday. While I hope it is a happy Tuesday, it doesn't look as cheery in the markets today (see pre-market chart below). I am getting the sense that we are going to retest 2008 and 2002 lows. The 2008 low on the…

In a very downbeat assessment of the ability of financial and monetary stewards to deal with the most protracted financial crisis is some 75 years, Paul Volcker, the esteemed former Fed Chariman warned that the economic slump has spread in…

Brian Gongol comes out with a list of the most-trafficked business and economic blogs every month. This month, we made it onto the list at number 25. I want to thank everyone for reading this blog and helping it get into the top 25 so…