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Michael Lewis is out with a new book “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” which discusses how the big hitters on Wall Street destroyed $1.75 trillion of capital. His phrase ‘Doomsday Machine’ is reminiscent of former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson’s ‘Doom Loop’ phraseology which I reviewed two weeks ago.
Below, Lewis discusses his take [...]

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‘On the Edge’ Banks Facing Writedowns After FDIC Loan Auctions – Bloomberg.com
The next European country set for debt watch: France – The Globe and Mail
FT.com – Edward Chancellor – How long has the lucky country got?
Defaulted Loans May Haunt Seniors – WSJ.com
FT.com – Big bank oversight to stay with Fed
Economist’s [...]

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This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
“Doom-mongers” – the Economist tells us – “are licking their wounds”. And why exactly are they licking their wounds? Well for two years now (apparently) they have been telling us that “the struggle to save the lat’s peg to the euro was bound to end in [...]

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Over the past few days, a number of major European banks have announced earnings results.  Two of the most dismal results were registered at the British company Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and at Germany’s Commerzbank. However, the similarity ends there because, while Commerzbank investment bankers received no bonus, the bankers at government-controlled RBS received [...]

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Banking Compensation – St. Louis Fed

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This post was originally published at A Fistful of Euros.
A new kind of battle is going on out there at the moment. In what must surely be a new twist to the old dialectic of blow against blow argument, a combination of the internet age and sophisticated data management software is adding an additional and [...]

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President Obama made a couple of comments in an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek that, while potentially true, point yet again to someone out of touch with populist rage in America.  It seems that Obama is still courting big business, especially Wall Street, after Republicans have said they are going after Wall Street money in the [...]

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The BEA says:
Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, (that is, from the third quarter to the fourth quarter), according to the "advance" estimate released by [...]

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This is pretty major stuff: Goldman recorded negative compensation in Q4 as zero bonuses are accruing for the quarter.
Reuters says:
The bank recorded negative compensation expense in the fourth quarter because of the contribution to Goldman Sachs Gives, the firm’s charitable arm.
The compensation total was far below the record $20.2 billion the firm paid in 2007, [...]

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Back in June I asked you all “When will the U.S. economy recover?.” The response was basically either “there will be no recovery to speak of” or “recovery is a long way off.” The poll results are embedded below.

I asked a similar question as the new year began since arguably a ‘technical recovery’ is underway. [...]