Audit Notes: A Tax a Reaganite Can Love, Cramer, Mad Max
David Stockman, who was in the Reagan cabinet as budget director, comes out swinging for a too-big-to-fail bank tax in a terrific New York Times op-ed: In supplying the banks with free deposit money (effectively, zero-interest loans), the save...
Bloomberg Punctures the Fed’s French Excuse
Bloomberg advances the AIG/French-banks story today quite a little bit. That's the one where the Fed said it had to pay 100 percent on those toxic swaps because the banks said they would be violating French law if they settled for anything les...
Audit Notes: FCIC’s Missing Media, What Crisis?, L’Affaire AIG
What did we miss as press coverage of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission fizzled last week? On Friday, we pointed out the dearth of reporting on the state-regulators' testimony. But Greg Kaufman of The Nation was there and "wondering wher...
Citi Not Quite As Awful As Last Year, Says Dow Jones
Here's a strange Wall Street Journal headline (of a Dow Jones Newswires story): "Citi Loss Narrows." Yeah—to $7.6 billion. Is the fact that it lost fewer billions than it did a year ago really your lede? Well, it leads the lede, anyway: ...
The WSJ on Another Junk-Debt Boom
The bubble is back. If you hadn't already figured that out, that's the lesson from The Wall Street Journal's excellent story this morning on how investors are flooding junk bonds as if the last two-and-a-half years hadn't happened. Back in the...
Audit Notes: Ignoring State Regs, Busy Bhatia, Volcker Vacuum
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission talked to state regulators—the only ones with credibility on the predatory-lending issue and you might say the crisis generally—and the business press barely even notices. Of course they woul...
A WSJ Story Shows TBTF Effects on the Market
The Wall Street Journal is excellent today to spotlight a sudden jump in ARM interest rates on New Year's Eve and what it means about the way floating rates are calculated. This is arcane but important stuff. The problem is with the Cofi index...
Steven Pearlstein: Then and Now
What a difference a year makes! Here's the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein last February: These guys won’t be happy until the government agrees to relieve them of every last one of their lousy loans and investments at inflated prices, re...
Audit Notes: Goldie’s AIG CDS, Smarter Readers, Adversarial Stance
James Keller has an interesting post over at RealClearMarkets on the Goldman Sachs/AIG controversy, which he says is "Likely Worse Than You Think." Keller questions whether Goldman sold billions of dollars worth of credit-default protection it...
Parsing the Latest Online-Charging Poll
There's yet another poll out there reporting the obvious: Most people say they won't pay for something they get for free now. Of course, it's about newspapers online. Harris Interactive found that 77 percent of U.S. adults say they won't pay t...
Revisiting the Journal’s TBTF Citi Story
Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism calls me out for swallowing a Wall Street Journal story showing the Citigroup side in the too-big-to-fail debate. I think she's right. I didn't mean to imply that this was an excuse for not breaking up the too-bi...
