Yesterday I mentioned the announcement by the FDIC to end its debt guarantee program and opined that this was the first sign of tightening/liquidity withdrawal by the U.S. government.  Today the evidence is mounting that this is indeed an orchestrated move toward policy normalization.
The FT spoke to treasury officials who confirmed this interpretation:
A senior Treasury [...]

Bloomberg News is writing a very worthy series of retrospective articles on the financial panic of September 2008.  I profiled the first one on Monday.  The next in the series came out yesterday and it makes for riveting and enlightening reading.
Bloomberg News reporters Bob Ivry, Mark Pittman and Christine Harper talked to a large [...]

This is a re-post that I hope serves as a reminder that although we are NOT talking about a liquidity crisis in the financial sector, but rather a solvency crisis, liquidity remains very much a concern. This post, despite being 6 months old, should highlight this issue in terms that are equally true today.
The original [...]

This is the time of year when everyone tends to look back and sum up the year in one way or another. I have been doing much of the same.

In keeping with that theme, I have taken a good look through my nearly 1400 posts to get a better sense of what I got right and what I got wrong and how knowing that can help me going forward. Call it an exercise in intellectual honesty. This exercise has given me a good understanding of where things went wrong in the past year and why.

It may also give me some thoughts as to where we need to go in 2009. Let me share a little of what I learned with you. This is a long but thoughtful post, so take a few minutes. It should be worth it.

On the whole my predictive powers were working pretty well this year. But, I made a few lousy calls and some controversial ones along the way. Below is my view of how the year went, on some of those calls and links to the relevant posts. At the end, I’ll wrap it up with a few thoughts about where that leaves my thinking for 2009.

Despite the gloom and doom that you might read right here, things are certainly much better in credit markets than at the height of the credit crisis. Of course we still have a long way to go, but this chart from Bloomberg of the TED spread should give one cheer.

This morning, the markets are looking wonderful. All the Asian markets were up with the Nikkei (Japan), Kospi (S. Korea) and Hang Seng (Hong Kong) up 10%+. The European markets were way up right out of the gate. And despite bad GDP figures coming this morning out of the U.S. at 8:30ET, .S. [...]

Credit markets continue to return to less extreme levels. While we are nowhere near where we were before the onset of the Lehman-induced panic, we are well off the panic levels of the worst of the crisis.
The Times of London is reporting that Libor rates in Dollars, Sterling and Euros are all coming down [...]

The Federal Reserve and its fellow central banks are pulling out all the stops to make sure the panic phase of this crisis is well and truly over. These kinds of moves are already having results as Libor and Euribor (the rate at whch banks lend to one another in Dollars and Euros) have [...]

Last week, I wrote a cheeky little post called “The Panic is over,” in which I argued that the Panic phase of this crisis would ebb and the more chronic problems of excessive debt, leverage and recession would move center stage. Of course, that very day, the Dow dropped some 500 points and people [...]

So, I am back in the saddle after a great weekend in Palm Beach. And three days almost entirely away from Newspapers, Televisions, Telephones, and Computers is a very good thing to clear the head. (Although I did happen to catch Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live” and I thought it was well [...]