Roger Bootle sat down with the Telegraph and ran through a few themes in regards to the stock market, the financial crisis, government debt, currencies and compensation in the financial sector.  He has a lot to say, in particular on banks, which he argues do not operate in competitive markets – one reason they pay [...]

Meredith Whitney downgraded Goldman Sachs from ‘buy’ to ‘neutral’ today.  Previously, Goldman had been her only buy recommended stock, all of the others rated neutral or ‘sell.’  Why did she do it?
FT Alphaville has the answer:
We are downgrading shares of Goldman Sachs to Neutral from Buy after over a 34% run in price since their [...]

A friend sent me the following article from USA Today:
The U.S. taxpayers’ investments in smaller banks are increasingly at risk.
In a sign that more banks are under great pressure from the recession, 34 financial institutions did not pay their quarterly dividends in August to the Treasury on funds obtained under the Troubled Asset Relief Fund [...]

Starwood Capital Group gets the assets in a consortium with TPG capital, Perry Capital and WLR LeFrak (another Wilbur Ross company – this guy is cleaning up in the FDIC private equity bonanza).
Here’s the press release:
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has signed a bid confirmation letter to sell a 40 percent equity interest in [...]

In a 9-page Vanity Fair article “Wall Street’s Near-Death Experience,”giving us a sneak peek into the lives of bankers during the global meltdown last Autumn a hilarious quote of great significance was buried.
At issue was the near-death experience that Lehman’s demise caused for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. After receiving a mysterious call from JPMorgan [...]

Marshall Auerback sent me a link to a recent Simon Johnson missive about Goldman Sachs. I had already seen and liked this article, but his e-mail prompted me to write this post. My question is: Why is Goldman a bank holding company?
Goldman becomes a bank
The reason Goldman became a bank to begin with is because [...]

I think it should be abundantly clear that I am bearish on financials given my sell equities call two weeks ago.  After all, it was the banking sector which I was most bullish on in April – August. They are also the stocks that have run up the most as well.  But now is the [...]

Janet Tavakoli was a recent guest on “On the Edge with Max Keiser” and had some troubling things to say about the state of the present U.S. financial system. 
She believes the liquidity pumped into the system will not be sufficient to reflate the economy because of over-leveraged U.S. households. The real burden of debt [...]

Last week I was at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting to listen to their ideas on how to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems like poverty and education. I may have more to say about this topic in a later post, but I wanted to first address the too-big-to-fail issue which became [...]

This is just in from the FDIC (emphasis added below). It should make clear that the banking system is still weak:
Credit quality declined sharply for loan commitments of $20 million or more held by multiple federally supervised institutions, according to the 32nd annual review of Shared National Credits (SNC).
The credit risk of these large [...]