Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel to oversee TARP, goes ballistic in this interview with the guys from Tech Ticker. She gets right to the heart of what is wrong with the banking industry.  You can tell she is very passionate about this issue.
Take a look.  Below are the videos in two [...]

On Monday, I mentioned that the Asian Development Bank Fund was a clear sign that Asia was cutting loose from the west and looking to take care of things domestically.  WIlliam Pesek of Bloomberg News put out a piece this morning echoing those sentiments, but also adding a lot more background regarding the events leading [...]

For a moment forget that Mark Mobius is talking his own book. He suggests in the video below that we are in the early stages of a new bull market for emerging markets. He does not suggest that it will be off to the races from the word go, however. Mobius thinks we are base-building right now.

Berkshire Hathaway’s Annual Meeting is this coming Saturday 2 May 2009 in Omaha, NE at the Qwest Center (details in pdf here).  Given the financial turmoil and all of the hubaloo around Berkshire’s credit rating, it should be a very interesting affair.
In conjunction with the Annual meeting, Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett’s son Peter is hosting [...]

Irrespective of whether one thinks the stress tests used to test the U.S. banking system is a sham (10% unemployment is not a worst-case scenario), the fact of the matter is these tests MUST show some differentiation in order to be credible.  Vincent Reinhart, a former Fed official now at the AEI, makes this case [...]

Paul McCulley of PIMCO made a few comments back in March which caught my attention.  Given how well banks are doing this earnings season, I thought it relevant to quote him here.  The essence of his remarks was this:

Deleveraging is a self-reinforcing vicious cycle brought upon by the Paradox of Thrift.  In order to stop [...]

Below you can watch a video clip of Congressional Oversight Chairperson Elizabeth Warren’s introductory remarks at a hearing today on Capitol Hill. Afterward, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner responds in a 10-minute open statement.

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Despite the fact that I can envisage a cyclical upturn this Winter, the menace of bank writedowns is ever-present. One analyst who has been particularly prescient on warning on this front is Mike Mayo, now working at Calyon. Below David Faber of CNBC talks about a recent prediction by Mayo that writedowns will be even [...]

Back in February I posted an article called “The bullish argument for the global economy” highlighting Goldman Sachs’ Chief Economist Jim O’Neill’s bullish view for the economy. O’Neill believed in February that a economic rebound was certainly possible due to fiscal and monetary stimulus. Paul Kasriel has made similar arguments.

While I do agree that fiscal and monetary stimulus have been great and may induce a cyclical rebound, I wanted to point out that he mentioned the Philly Fed Survey and the ISM surveys as potential leading indicators of recovery.

I have the same misgivings about the Public Private Partnership Investment Program that Paul Krugman does. However, I still think it could work in conjunction with all of the other stimulus being applied (at least in inducing a cyclical rebound, which seems to be the goal). Krugman does not. Watch the video [...]