Share
There has been quite a lot of hub-bub today about President Obama’s fat cat remarks and his meeting with bankers exhorting them to lend. Let me tie these events in with a few other themes into a comprehensive picture of what is happening in politics and banking.
In a nutshell, we are getting a bunch of [...]

Share
Wells Fargo has announced it is to repay $25 billion in funds it received from government under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. This makes Wells the last of the big banks to repay its TARP funds.  In announcing the decision, the company CEO was quoted as saying:
TARP stabilized our country’s financial system when confidence in [...]

Share
There will be no Dubai sovereign default. The government of oil-rich Abu Dhabi surprised investors this morning in announcing a $10 billion rescue package to pay for upcoming obligations of embattled Dubai World.
Below Richard Stovin-Bradford of the Financial Times speaks about Abu Dhabi’s decision to finally come to Dubai World’s rescue.  I share his view [...]

Share
Citigroup has confirmed it will repay $20 billion of the bailout money it has received from government, becoming the latest big bank to exit the TARP (troubled asset relief program). To prevent capital ratios from dipping, the company will issue $17 billion in new shares and $3.5 billion in new debt (“tangible equity units”) to [...]

Share
The closing of the Bank of the United States could be considered the event during the Great Depression that was most akin for the U.S. to the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year.  The event occurred on 12 December 1930 – so 79 years ago yesterday.  The blog News from 1930 details the events from [...]

Share
Below are three videos from a talk at the 2009 Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, CA, where James Galbraith talks about the Hyman Minsky concept of the instability of stability. This concept is fundamental to the behavioural psychology behind capitalist systems.  This is a case where stability invites greater risk-taking and eventually creates instability. [...]

Share
By now you have heard that Dubai World, the investment company, has asked its creditors for a six-month delay in repaying its debt (see articles in links).  This is what is commonly referred to as default. Now many are wondering if Dubai the country is on the verge of default and asking who is most [...]

Share
This is a post I just wrote over at Yves Smith’s site Naked Capitalism in response to a reader request. Marshall Auerback has already written a reply as well and I will post this later today.
A reader at Naked Capitalism asked us to respond to a recent article from the Christian Science Monitor asking Does [...]

Share
I have written extensively about how I believe the bank bailouts were the worst of all possible solutions – fixes that perpetuate too big to fail, moral hazard and crony capitalism.  That ship has sailed, but the questions still linger – in large part because the fix has not trickled down to common folk to [...]

Share
Video embedded below.

See also Democratic Rep. DeFazio Calls for Geithner and Summers to Be Fired – Yves Smith