Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke told us when the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was launched that they were not concerned about the health of our banking system.  In fact, this was not the case. They were concerned about specific institutions and the overall health of the system. The U.S. financial system was much weaker [...]

The following is my translation of a much-discussed article that appeared in Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet at the weekend.  This information was being withheld from the public and leaked at an inopportune moment.
Note that the Swedish government has secretly been preparing the banks for financial Armageddon, encouraging Swedbank into a rights issue which arguably was [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matt Winkler wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday explaining why he is after the Federal Reserve to come clean about it’s secret lending program during the height of the financial crisis.
Bloomberg has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Reserve to force the Fed to reveal the name of the [...]

Marshall Auerback here. I have been posting at an interesting new site called New Deal 2.0. You may have seen Edward linking out to articles on the site.
Edward saw an article I wrote there recently and asked me to post it here as well to highlight a recurrent theme at Credit Writedowns – namely that [...]

Everyone is running with his or her own “Lessons from Lehman” post as if we have actually learned anything from the financial crisis – and as if it is already over and behind us. Well, I have some lessons learned for you via Dharma Joint (hat tip Scott).
Unfortunately, there are some in the financial industry [...]

Say I’m a politician and I am concerned about my re-election prospects in 2010.  I have been a member of Congress for seven years now and have developed a good reputation as a reform-minded economic realist willing to listen to a number of competing economic ideas. However, right now I am a bit concerned [...]