Along with the residential housing bust in Ireland, a commercial real estate (CRE) bust is definitely on the table. According to the newspaper the Irish Independent up to 10 billion euros of writedowns are possible for the Irish property developers and banks.

This in from the Times today: Bradford & Bingley is in big trouble. They are trying to do a rights issue and issue a profit warning at the same time. Can anyone tell me how one gets shareholders to pony up another 88p to buy a stock that is down from 2 quid [...]

The bloggers over at Calculated Risk have reported on a story making the rounds in the Internet. This story involves S&P’s downgrade of Alt-A Residential Mortgage Backed Securities (RMBSs). The crux of the matter is that S&P misjudged how much collateral in the underlying value of the homes there was to protect these [...]

I am on record for expecting a serious downturn after the Tech Bubble crashed in 2001. We muddled through for a few years, but ultimately most of the damage was done and gone by 2004. The Tech Bubble was a bubble of asset prices that had little influence on the underlying global financial [...]

The Lex column in Yesterday’s FT highlights what many market players are thinking about the company’s £4 billion ($8 billion) rights issue: the economic outlook in the UK is worse than feared.
“The main potential explanation for the apparent excess capital is that the board’s outlook for the real economy is worse than stated. Retail bankers’ [...]

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 [...]

Since the housing bubble created a global credit crunch in June 2007 after Bear Stearns announced the collapse of two funds it ran (its High-Grade Structured Credit Fund and its High Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leveraged Fund), there have been a massive number of announced write-offs and bank failures. As a result, a number [...]

The credit bubble has claimed its first major finance company: Bear Stearns. The venerable firm, which traded as high as $160 in 2007 and was trading above $60 just last week, was bought for a mere $2 per share by rival JP Morgan Chase and Co.
From my point of view, this is the first [...]