In this case, Paul La Monica, who always seems to find a silver lining, no matter how bogus, is now saying that he expects losses in the financial industry to exceed $1 trillion. He even quotes noted bear Nouriel Roubini.
It would appear that the financial journalists are starting to notice reality chewing on their tuchas.
Finally. The Obama has used the word “lie” to describe McCain’s latest ad.
People in Washington hate the term, but who cares, the electorate appreciates “straight talk.”
From Obama spokesperson Hari Sevugan:
This ad is a lie, and it’s part of the old, tired politics of a party in Washington that has run out of ideas and run out of steam. Even though a host of independent, nonpartisan organizations have said this attack isn’t true, Senator McCain continues to lie about Senator Obama’s plan to give 95% of all families a tax cut of $1,000, and not raise taxes for those making under $250,000 a single dime. The reason so many families are hurting today is because we’ve had eight years of failed Bush policies that Senator McCain wants to continue for another four, and that’s what Barack Obama will change as President.
UBS has settled with the states of Massachusetts and New York, and agreed to buy $19.4 billion in auction rate securities at face value, and pay $150 million in fines.
Meanwhile, Bank of America has received subpoenas from the SEC and other agencies on its ARS activities.
Financial “innovation”, the gift that keeps on giving.
Jury selection is supposed to start Sept 23, and the trial could be finished by some time in late October.
Is this special treatment because Uncle Ted is a Senator?
Just wondering.
Well, Fannie Mae just posted a $2.3 billion loss, cut its dividend, and is will no longer buy and resell Alt-A mortgages.
That sound you hear is the housing market seizing up, and it does look like mortages will be getting more expensive, and given that the spread between LIBOR and Treasury Bills, the so called “TED Spread”, remains at near historic highs, I don’t really see any unfreezing in the near to medium future.
However, the the US dollar is on a tear right now, and a strong dollar attracts investment, which means that there is more money out there to lend, which might make loans cheaper.
I still think that current interest rates are unsustainably low, but YMMV.
Oil and gasoline are down, as are commodities like copper, silver, and gold.
This points to declining inflation, good news, but only because there are real signs of a deep, hard recession, which is bad news.
The fact that Productivity growth has slowed points to a slowdown too.
I wonder what the moderation in commodities will do to wholesale inventory numbers, which have been up because of price appreciation in said commodities.
BTW, a monoliner insurer just went belly up. ACA Capital Holdings Inc. just terminated $65 billion in credit default contracts, and turned itself over to creditors.
BTW, as a result of the IndyMac implosion, people are starting to split their bank accounts among multiple banks, to ensure that they are all completely covered by FDIC insurance.
I think that we are seeing a generational shift in the attitudes of people about finance and investing.
By more than 4:1, 79% to 19%.
Interestingly enough, my (very Republican, so not voting in the Dem Primary) Brother-inlaw lives in the district, but in any case this is good news for America, for a number of reasons:
And someone found a copy of the disgusting anti-Semitic ad on the web:
Disgraceful.
But says that he is not the father of their child.
Damn. Well, at least he is not the VP pick.
I’m not sure why Georgia chose this time to start shelling South Ossetian capital of Tskhinval, but this sort of behavior has elicited the expected Russian response, and they have started sending additional “peacekeepers” to the region.
The Guardian has an interesting analysis, if just because it avoids the common wisdom available on a Google News search that somehow the Georgians shelling a city full of women and children is Russian aggression.
Their analysis is that this was a well planned offensive, and that they hoped to catch the Russians off balance, with Putin in Beijing for the Olympics, and it now appears that they were wrong:
Observers had little doubt that the operation to take South Ossetia back under Georgian control bore the hallmarks of a planned military offensive.
It was not the result of a ceasefire that had broken down the night before – it was more a fulfilment of the promise the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, had made to recapture lost national territory, and with it a measure of nationalist pride.
((emphasis mine)
It appears that the US has been aggressively supporting and training the Georgian army for some time, and this may have contributed to Saakashvili’s belief that he could get away with it.
I’m wondering if this isn’t a screw up, and that Bush and His Evil Minions™, particularly Cheney, might have been looking for something like this just before the election, for electoral benefit, but their boy in Tbilisi pulled the trigger too early.
Steve Waldman at Naked Capitalism makes a very good point: the problems that led to the credit crunch were not excessive risk taking, but rather an excess of risk aversion.
Essentially, people were not looking to take risks, they were looking at good rates of return from little or no risk, so, for example, since, “Housing never declines in value,” it was safe, and prices “always” go up.
The same goes for the Yen carry trade, where people made money by borrowing in Yen, and investing in dollars, and making money off the spread.
This also gave us the various tranches of CDOs, which are now collapsing.
Investing in risk would be things like alternative energy projects, or improvements in productivity, or new ways to feed the world, and there was no investment in these areas following the dotcom boom.
All the “innovation” that we saw was merely an attempt to break the relationship between risk and return, and it failed.
Given the record of the NRC toward disclosure, the idea that this is a major break with the past.
Steven Aftergood take on it is that Congress is breathing down their necks because, they were not notified of a major safety event:
According to David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, the triggering event in this case was congressional outrage at the NRC’s concealment of a major “nuclear safety event” in 2006 at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin, Tennessee.
In that case, approximately 35 liters of highly enriched uranium solution leaked and spilled, creating the possibility of a criticality accident, i.e. an uncontrolled chain reaction. Yet “NRC failed to notify the public or Congress for 13 months regarding this serious incident,” complained Rep. John Dingell in a July 3, 2007 letter (pdf) to NRC Chairman Dale E. Klein.
If I were a member of Congress, that would piss me off.
If I lived near Erwin, Tennessee, I’d consider putting my house up for sale.
They have settled with NY State AG Andrew Cuoma by agreeing to buy back $7 billion in auction rate securities and paying a $100 million fine, and to, “Use its ‘best efforts’ to liquidate” an additional $12 billion in ARS by the end of 2009.
This is about the fact that Citi, and most of the other banks involved in the auction rate securities, sold these as being just as liquid as a money market account, and the market then froze up, locking up $300+ billion.
I would expect increased pressure for other bankers to settle too.
The prosecutors were asking for 30 years to life, but it’s pretty clear that Hamdan was just some poor schmuck who chauffeured bin Laden because he needed a job:
The sentence was a stunning rebuke to prosecutors who had insisted on a prison term of at least 30 years and portrayed Hamdan throughout the trial as a hardened al-Qaeda warrior. The jury of six military officers convicted him Wednesday of supporting al-Qaeda by driving and guarding bin Laden and ferrying weapons for the terror group, but he was acquitted of terror conspiracy.
Of course, in a civilian court, much of the evidence that got him that sentence would not have been even have been admissible.
I’m not sure when he is technically due to finish his sentence, but for his sake, I hope that it is after January 20, 2009, because I would expect retribution from Bush and His Evil Minions™.
An executive at Huron Consulting Group has filed a complaint that he was fired, in part, for not donating to the Mitt Romney campaign (he is also alleging age discrimination):
The company denies that charge. But officials confirm the authenticity of emails showing that the CEO of the Chicago-based corporate consulting firm, Gary E. Holdren, repeatedly linked his requests for donations to Huron’s business prospects. The emails were provided to The Wall Street Journal by Mr. Pimentel.[the complainant]
In another email, dated Sept. 21, 2007, Mr. Holdren wrote, “I wanted to thank all of you who contributed to Mitt Romney. You can’t realize how much leverage this gives Huron going forward to ask various people for business.”
Other emails from Mr. Holdren refer to conversations with Mr. Romney, deals Huron supposedly won from Romney supporters at other firms and promises to reward Huron executives with “business for your contributions.”
It’s why, when Republicans talk about running government like a business, you should run the other way. It’s all graft and back scratching.
2007 is not going to be a good year for mortgages. The percent of seriously delinquent after 12 months is 0.97% for mortgages issued in the first half of 2007, as opposed to 0.33% for those issued in 2006. Freddie Mac reported 1.38% at 18 months as compared to 0.38% for 2007 and 2006 respectively.
The defaults in 2006 aren’t really hitting the banks yet, and we’ve still had 7 bank failures….What happens when 2007 really hits?
One consequence of the credit crunch is that even with a Fed Funds rate of 2%, interest rates for everyone are going up.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in municipal bonds, where you also have the collapse of the monoliner insurers making getting a good rating more difficult.
The article gives an example, where the Bay Area Toll Authority refinanced $700 million in bonds at 5.33%, when last year it was 4%.
That’s an additional $9.31 million that they have to carry, and we are seeing this across the country, so new roads and bridges, and needed maintenance on existing infrastructure, are all being deferred.
I don’t see it getting any better for a while.
There are a number of possibilities as to Boeing’s response to the new RFP, but the possibility that Boeing would refuse to submit a proposal to the RFP.
While I don’t think that Boeing would be serious about a no-bid, it would be an interesting ploy to either get the terms and conditions reset to something more favorable, get a split order, or to get the Congress to give them the contract through legislation.
I actually think that this strategy is only marginally less likely than Boeing submitting a shortened 777, because I don’t think that they could meet a timetable for the bids or delivery with that.
H/T The DEW Line
Detroit Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick was sent to the county jail for violating his bond by going to Windsor, Ontario without the court’s permission.
Hizonner Kilpatrick is on trial for perjury and other charges as a result of a sex scandal with his assistant.
Kilpatrick’s office said that his chief of staff, would serve as acting mayor, so that:
Residents can be assured government will continue to operate as usual.
In Detroit…..Somehow….Not so reassuring.
They can get $5-10K for donations, and the economy is driving a surge in donations.
Poor women selling a part of their body out of financial need. How long until it’s kidneys like in India?
The consultancy firm Johnson & Assoc. is predicting that bonuses on Wall Street will be lower this year because the firms have lost so much money.
Given the history of American business, and Wall Street in particular, in the past few decades, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Only the little people pay for senior executive’s mistakes.