This is part two of the End of Wall Street series the Wall Street Journal is producing.
Chapter Two of A WSJ series: What was going through the minds of CEOs, corporate boards, fund managers and mortgage lenders as they created hard-to-understand derivatives Warren Buffett once called “weapons of financial mass destruction.”
You have to love how [...]

Charlie spoke with Obama’s Director of the Office of Management & Budget yesterday.  The video is below and it runs 30 minutes.  Orszag talks about Obama’s health care reform proposal after the first 11 minutes taken up by Obama and his press conference.
 

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Not necessarily. There’s a lot more to it than just GDP.  Last year at almost exactly this time, I mentioned this in my post Recession while GDP is growing? because a lot of people were getting excited about the fact that Q2 GDP was going to show positive growth. But GDP is only one of [...]

This is a huge deal.  FASB is considering requiring all financial assets be valued at fair values on balance sheets.  Hat tip Andrew. Bloomberg reports (notice my highlighting in bold):
The scope of the FASB’s initiative, which has received almost no attention in the press, is massive. All financial assets would have to be recorded at [...]

When last week’s US jobless claims number was released, I indicated it was artificially low because of changes in the summer auto production schedules.  Rather than look at the numbers as they are released from week to week, we should look at the 4-week moving average and its comparison to previous periods to gauge the [...]

Bernanke Says Add Consumer Protection to Fed Mandate – Bloomberg.com
You have to respect the chutzpah behind this. Audacious

NAB raises $2b in oversubscribed placement
Banks are getting capital everywhere.

Buffett’s $91,000 shares are a steal
Barrons thinks they could get 125K by next year

No time to waste in reforming German banking – FT
Its not just HRE, but Landesbanken too. [...]

Here’s a credit-crisis video retrospective from the Wall Street Journal. It is chapter one of a three part series.  Notice the Wall Street meme that subprime borrowers caused the crisis which is patently false.  It’s all about dodgy credits and Fannie and Freddie? Total rubbish. 
But, of course, if you say it enough, people might [...]

Germany never participated in the upswing of the housing bubble. This fact has led German politicians of all stripes to mistakenly believe their banking system was somehow immune to the problems infecting bubble markets like the US or Spain.  Unfortunately, it has not worked out that way because the globalization of finance has shifted risk [...]

 
Here’s a nice clip from Stephen Roach from last week asking “where’s the demand?” 
His thesis is pretty simple:  we have an inventory-induced upturn that might actually show positive GDP growth in the U.S. for Q3, what I have termed the mother of all inventory corrections.  But, that’s it.  Underneath this is no discernible pickup [...]

President Barack Obama was elected last year in a sizable victory over his Republican competitor. Bolstering his position was the huge Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Given these advantages, combined with intelligence and his natural talent as an orator, the President could pretty much chart his own course.
He did so, immediately turning to [...]