S&P upgrades CMBS to AAA week after downgrading to BBB- – Rolfe Winkler
Inexplicable.

Digg Stops Hijacking Your Twitter Links, Not Sorry About It
Agree 100% with this post. Very untrustworthy.

Department store sales slip 11% | The Japan Times Online
Ugly. ugly. ugly.

Three Myths about the Consumer Financial Product Agency – Elizabeth Warren
Must read piece.

Bernanke Op-ed in WSJ: The [...]

13-minute video from the Wall Street Journal.
Related stories:

Iceland warms to Europe
Iceland to hand bank stakes to creditors
Iceland’s rehabilitation

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If you haven’t seen any of Jim the Realtor’s videos over at Calculated Risk, you are not getting a feel for what’s happening in residential real estate in America.  The guy really gives the whole housing problem in California a look you wouldn’t have unless you were a real estate agent living it. His videos [...]

Over the past week, America’s banks have had a bumper earning season, in part courtesy of the Federal Reserve’s accommodative monetary policy. Even before this week, a number of market pundits (including me) began to wonder aloud whether the Fed had any strategy with which to remove all of the excess liquidity it has created [...]

This post is going to be a bit wonkish.  I apologize for those of you who are not economics geeks.  Hopefully, you will find it interesting nonetheless.
At the urging of my good friend Marshall Auerback, I have been looking into the Minskyian twist to the neoclassical view of the world.  Economists who follow Hyman Minsky [...]

On numerous occasions you will have heard me use the term ‘monetizing debt’ to describe what happens when the central bank creates money out of thin air in order to increase reserves in the banking system. The central bank is certainly increasing the monetary base in this regard, but are they really monetizing the debt [...]

Earnings season is upon us and the Swedish banks have begun reporting earnings. Their results have seen huge writedowns that demonstrate large and continued exposure to souring loans in the Baltics.
Handelsbanken and Nordea reported today. Despite the writedowns, you do get the sense that things are going better than expected as the banks beat [...]

This came in overnight via the FT.  Most of the shortfall in revenue is made up through spending cuts.  Below are the relevant paragraphs:
The agreement involves cutting nearly $6bn from schools and community colleges and close to $3bn from the state’s university system, although Mr Schwarzenegger said education cuts would be fully “refunded”.
An additional $1.3bn [...]

No Longer Alone, Ron Paul Fights the Fed – Real Time Economics – WSJ
Paul’s bill to audit Fed has 274 co-sponsors.

Some bailout firms up lobbying spending in 2Q – Yahoo! Finance
Increased lobbying plus climb in shares equals no reform.

Notes on a real estate trip in China – Michael Pettis
Bubble in Chinese real estate – and [...]

This just hit the wires.
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CIT Group Inc. (NYSE: CIT), a leading provider of financing to small businesses and middle market companies, today announced that it entered into a $3 billion loan facility provided by a group of the Company’s major bondholders. CIT further announced that it intends to commence a comprehensive restructuring of [...]