This contribution from Daniel Berger is a letter to Michael Smerconish in response to a commentary Smerconish wrote on 10 May 2009 in the Philadelphia Inquirer “Head Strong: Did Hollywood inspire the meltdown men?” A shorter version of Berger’s piece appeared at New Deal 2.0 in July.
Given my recent two posts on greed (“More on [...]

This is the biggest weekend for FDIC seizures yet. Seven banks have been shut down.
Below is the list of banks.
Partners Bank, Naples, Florida (Stonegate assumes assets)

As of September 30, 2009, Partners Bank had total assets of $65.5 million and total deposits of approximately $64.9 million. Stonegate Bank did not pay the FDIC a premium for [...]

The following post is a re-post from Rick Bookstaber’s blog. Bookstaber is a market veteran who has long and storied history of achievement. He worked at Bridgewater Associates, ran the Quantitative Equity Fund at FrontPoint Partners and was in charge of risk management at Moore Capital Management amongst other things.
A tenet of economics is that [...]

The positive earnings announcement by Wells Fargo on Wednesday was marred by a sell recommendation from Dick Bove and a lot of chatter about credit writedowns and mortgage servicing rights (MSRs). I wanted to add a few words about the report, MSRs, and bank stocks more generally.
First of all, this has been a very good [...]

If our response focuses only on the symptoms rather than the underlying causes of the crisis, then we shall bequeath to future generations a serious risk of another crisis even worse than the one we have experienced.
-Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England

The Bank of England head has come out unequivocally against continuing with [...]

You are a teacher at a local primary school. Each school day you and some of your colleagues watch over the children at the school playground to make sure all of the children follow the rules and keep their hands to themselves. Your role is to keep the children safe. Mind you, this is a [...]

Watch the hour-long retrospective which aired tonight on PBS’s Frontline.  It should be very enlightening in regards to the seeds of the bubble and meltdown.  It examines who the players in the 1990s and 2000s were, what their attitude to regulation was, and how lax regulation created a bubble and a bust.
Also see the following [...]

Back in March when the US Government felt compelled to bail out out Citigroup, Tracy Alloway over at FT Alphaville noticed a curious thing – Citigroup had effectively been nationalized.
No, they were not seized by government, but Citi was controlled by government.  The Feds had 36% of shares outstanding, which in many cases is [...]

David Einhorn delivered a speech at the 2009 Value Investing Conference that is creating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere. He said a lot of interesting things about the investing and political climate.  A surprising amount of it comes out of the playbook here at Credit Writedowns.
Below are the quotes I want to highlight [...]

The title of this post is somewhat misleading – designed to be provocative to get you to read what I have to say. Indeed, I am going to defend Goldman Sach’s right to pay what it likes to its employees. But, I am also going to defend your right to be outraged and to look [...]