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AIG posts $8.9 billion loss | Reuters
CDS demonization watch, Greece edition | Felix Salmon
Get a Credit Card Through Credit Unions and Small Banks to Save – Credit Cards – Lifehacker
Welcome to the revolution Mr. Weidner – Abnormal Returns
Reinflating the Bubble : Ryan Chittum – CJR
Facebook Secures Patent for News Feed [...]

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If you didn’t know, new credit card rules just came into effect. Jon Stewart has a pretty funny take on the industry.
Make it rain, Bank of America, make it rain (credit card fees, that is)!

Also see Learn How Canceling Credit Cards Affects Your Credit Score and Learn The Details of Your New Credit Card Bill [...]

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John Mauldin’s latest is about deleveraging and how this secular trend will drive the macro picture in 2010. The question is why? Read and find out. Also see A conversation with Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio for another good commentary on this topic.
John Mauldin, Best-Selling author and recognized financial expert, is also editor of the free [...]

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Is this propaganda? I just received this e-mail from the FDIC’s consumer news with the title above. Personally, I never doubted that unbrokered deposits under $250,000 are safe at U.S. depositary institutions. But, the natural sceptic in me doesn’t like to see someone reaffirm what I thought I already knew.

As bank failures are in the [...]

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I have just taken a look at the consumer credit figures for September, released just yesterday by the Federal Reserve. The data do show some modest deleveraging, especially when looking at the recent increase in nominal GDP. However, it is still not clear to me that the scale of deleveraging is great enough to induce [...]

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But, everywhere I look, everybody is saying it is.
I would like to be true to the data and not just take the government’s seasonally-adjusted numbers at face value.
Judge for yourself. Here’s the data:
This is what everyone is focused on – the seasonally-adjusted data. The part in red shows consumer credit down $12 billion.
 

But, what [...]

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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 [...]

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Last week, I highlighted some of the ideas of Australian economist Steve Keen in my post, “Steve Keen and the spectre of terminal debt.”  Keen is of the Minsky camp and he believes that an unsustainable debt bubble has build up in the industrialized world which can only be brought to heel through a ‘debt [...]

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In late June, I posted two items China’s present growth story is built on malinvestment and Chinese stock market bubble inflating, on the building bubble in Chinese lending and asset markets.  The crux of the pots was that China, in its efforts to reflate the economy to meet very high growth short-term targets and start [...]

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Credit is still tight despite the low Libor rates and other signs that market stress has died down. Case and point is an item I ran across on the Norwegian site E24. Apparently, Amsterdam is losing revenue as its prostitutes in the red light district cannot get credit.  Here is my translation of the story:
The [...]