Spain is perhaps the next domino in the global credit bubble to fall. The UK economy is slowing as well, but the pace of slowing in Spain is truly remarkable.
According to Spanish-language news reports I have seen today (see Round-up), Spain is being hit with a housing bust that has led to increasing unemployment [...]

As I have mentioned in previous posts, the housing bubble was an international phenomenon. As a result, the U.S. subprime meltdown is indeed spreading beyond this limited sector. In the US, expect Alt-A and prime mortgages to feel the pain as the economy suffers recession. However, I would like to turn the [...]

As I predicted on Saturday, HBOS has gotten caught up in the global mortgage meltdown. Bloomberg reports:
HBOS Plc, the U.K.’s biggest mortgage lender, will sell 4 billion pounds ($8 billion) of shares to bolster capital depleted by asset writedowns and a deteriorating housing market.
As the UK housing market has only begun to turn down [...]

Deutsche Bank released earnings that showed a loss for the first time in five years as they wrote down $4.2 billion in equity as a result of the global credit crisis. While Deutsche Bank has gotten off well because of reduced exposure to sub-prime, I fully expect more writedowns as the credit crisis continues. [...]

The TED spread is a common measure of fear and risk in the capital markets. Judging from where the TED spread is now (see chart below), there’s a lot of fear and risk to go around.

The TED spread measures the gap between the interest rate at which the U.S. Treasury funds itself (3-month T-bills) [...]

As the Fed Funds rate gets close to zero, pundits have been worrying about a pending liquidity trap. While I think these worries are well placed because the Fed is running out of bullets, I am more concerned about inflation right now.
We are in the midst of a credit crisis. Banks are having [...]

RBS, the second largest British bank behind HSBC, has finally come clean on the credit crisis. The price? An enormous $24 billion in new capital needed. This is a huge story because this does not even begin to discount the credit problems British banks are likely to suffer when the UK market starts [...]

As the writedowns at global financial institutions near $300 billion in capital lost as a result of the sub-prime crisis, the question as to when we reach a bottom is ever more urgent. Market history tells us that the severity of the bust after an economic upswing is usually related to the size of [...]

We are months into the credit crisis that began last summer, triggered by the meltdown in U.S. sub-prime lending. The crisis has been much deeper, much wider and longer than most market participants have expected. Yet, until the failure of Bear Stearns last month, no major financial institution had suffered. This crisis [...]

I am now updating the information on my Credit Crisis Timeline here:
http://www.creditwritedowns.com/credit-crisis-timeline
There have been a tremendous number of economic dislocations during the present financial crisis. Initially written off as a sub-prime crisis, leading policy makers said the crisis was contained. It has since spilled over into Jumbo mortgage rates, Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), all asset [...]