On April 14, 2009, President Obama made a major address on the economy and his policies at George Washington University. It was a wide-ranging address that reiterated major themes that he has been making since taking office. Full Transcript. Video
He offered a goal for his actions that I applaud:
…I want every American to know [...]
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The Plan
By now, almost everyone must know that in the last week the Federal Reserve and the Obama Administration fired coordinated bombshells at the financial crisis.
First, last Thursday the Federal Reserve announced major increases in asset purchase programs, adding $1.150 trillion to the total. The total included purchase of up to $300 billion of long-term [...]
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It continues to amaze and perplex me that President Obama has not listened to the chorus of informed commentators outside (and even inside) of Wall Street who make a compelling case for letting the big financial institutions fail. At a time where Federal funds are being overtaxed from all sides, it makes absolutely no sense [...]
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It used to be a million dollars was a lot. Then billions were bandied about with hardly a blink on an eye, but a billion still seemed an incomprehensible amount to me. Now the government and the financiers are talking in TRILLIONS. How much more incomprehensible is a trillion than a billion. A lot!
Here is [...]
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The Wall Street Journal has an article that describes in some detail how hedge funds and Goldman Sachs bet on the collapse in the US housing market using hundreds of billions of dollars of credit default swaps, swaps that eventually were bought by AIG for pennies per year. In the event, when the housing market [...]
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I’m not alone in thinking that bonds of the big financial institutions are at a high and growing risk of forced markdowns in value (see my post, "The Financial Time Bomb .."). Analysts at BNP Paribas SA, as reported by Bloomberg, published the striking chart reproduced below.
The chart compares European indices of credit default [...]
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