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Be sure to see William Shatner’s poetic reading of Levi Johnston’s tweets below. Pretty funny.
Buffett Revisits Hunting Ground for Survivors: Alice Schroeder – Bloomberg.com
"Buffett isn’t as bullish as he sounds."

Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart – New Scientist
I have always said George W. Bush is NOT dumb. He is just wilfully [...]

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Hypo Needs an Extra $10.2 Billion to Survive – WSJ.com
"German real-estate financier Hypo Real Estate Holding AG needs an additional €7 billion ($10.2 billion) in capital from the German government to stay afloat and won’t return to profitability until 2012 at the earliest, Chief Executive Axel Wieandt said at a shareholder meeting."

When Old Flames Beckon [...]

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‘False dawn’ in UK housing market
"It’s tempting to call the turn in the mortgage market at this point, and there is certainly concrete evidence that lending for house purchase is increasing," said the CML’s economist Paul Samter. "But there are still constraints affecting the lending industry’s capacity to fund increased lending, as well as less [...]

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Recently Allan Meltzer, a former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, wrote a widely noted and provocative article in the Wall Street Journal called “What Happened to the ‘Depression?’” He called for an end to deficit-inducing stimulus because the cries of Depression from noted mainstream economists has been proven false.  His thesis is that these [...]

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Citigroup has just released a forecast which is very troubling in regards to employment and growth in the Spanish economy.  With unemployment already having hit 17.9%, Citigroup expects layoffs to increase this to 22% in 2010.  Below is my translation of the Spanish-language article in Finanzas.
The stabilization that the Spanish labour market seems to have [...]

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Every country has a problem child or two in the financial services sector. America has Citigroup and Bank of America. Britain has RBS and HBOS/Lloyds.  And Germany has Hypo Real Estate. 
I have been chronicling problems at the real estate lender on this blog for some time now and last posted on HRE in April [...]

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I have bee off for a couple of days but plan on returned to full force later today.  Here are the links from the past few days minus tech and blog-related items.  If I have a lot more links, I will post them this evening.

El Banco de Espana exige que se liquiden los bancos o [...]

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Last week I wrote a post suggesting that the Germans were getting tired of bailing out their banks and had moved to more draconian solutions to ‘fix’ the banking sector. Nationalizing Hypo Real Estate this week will be the first move in that direction.
But the Germans are not nearly finished in [...]

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The first bank nationalization in German history is about to take place. At issue is Hypo Real Estate (HRE), a troubled Munich-based company that lends to commercial property developers and to build offices, hotels, roads, airports, you name it.
This issue has been building for nearly 7 months. Back in late September, just after Lehman [...]

On Friday, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) leaked a bombshell – a confidential report by Bafin, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, found that German banks were sitting on over 800 billion euros in toxic assets. Just three months ago, the reports coming out suggested the problem was only half as large, 400 billion euros.