September 29, 2008
From today's WSJ, a motley coalition that showed up at the NYSE to protest the TARP bill's possible passage. [Copyright Shannon Stapleton/Reuters]...
Some useful analysis here from the Washington Post on why the bailout bill failed, despite being described by the President and both parties' leaders as critical and essential. I accept most of the arguments, ranging from bad salesmanship on outward,...
Words don't do it justice, so here you are, your moment of markets non-zen. I'm still amazed at the nitwits who thought they had an argument-stopper simply because the markets didn't fall 1,000 points when the House TARP vote was...
I keep getting emails saying, "See, the House voted down the TARP bill, and the world didn't end, so we must be right in saying it was unnecessary." Three points: The markets aren't convinced TARP is dead -- the U.S....
Voting in the U.S. House of Representatives is underway on the financial services bailout bill, and it is a very tight thing. This is going to be brutally close. Dow is tanking with it looking like a failed vote. Unbelievable....
The chart du jour comes from Google Trends, and it's the twelve month trend in searches for "FDIC" (the folks who insure U.S. banking deposits)....
I've been listing books lately that are about the credit crisis, albeit in indirect fashion, like the excellent Plight of the Fortune-tellers. Today's book is one that isn't really about the crisis at all, but turns out to be...
A few quick things to items others may find interesting (and not all credit-market related): Merger arb one of only two hedge fund strategies up on the year (HFR) Jim Grant interview at the FT (FT) Lehman's Demise Triggered Cash...
I know no-one cares about anything other than the synchronized collapse of global credit markets, but runner Haile Gebrselassie's weekend performance in the Berlin Marathon is worth a moment of celebration. In that flat and fast race, the Ethiopian distance...
The boots have been put to the decoupling hypothesis, with Europe now in full we've-got-bailouts-too panic, and Asian only slightly behind. People forget, but European banks are, on average, materially more levered than their U.S. counterparts, and, as a result,...
