Archive for the 'Economy' Category
Markets Brace for Seismic September
September 4th, 2007Via: New York Post: The Labor Day weekend is over, the kids are back in school and Wall Street traders have returned to their desks, bracing themselves for a bumpy ride. But this year investors shouldn’t count on the “Santa Claus rally” to rescue them from the tumult created by the subprime market implosion. ” […]
PROPERTY PRICES IN SOME AREAS COULD BE CUT IN HALF
September 3rd, 2007Via: Finfacts Ireland: US homes may lose as much as half their value in some US cities as the housing bust deepens, according to Yale University professor Robert Shiller. Meanwhile, Martin Feldstein of Harvard University says that experience suggests that the dramatic decline in residential construction provides an early warning of a coming recession. The […]
Mexico Trucks to Roll on U.S. Highways
September 3rd, 2007Via: Yahoo: The Bush administration can proceed with a plan to open the U.S. border to long haul Mexican trucks as early as next week after an appeals court rejected a bid by labor, consumer and environmental interests to block the initiative. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco late on Friday denied […]
U.S. May Invoke ‘State Secrets’ to Squelch Suit Against Swift
September 3rd, 2007Via: International Herald Tribune: The Bush administration is signaling that it plans to turn once again to a favorite legal tool known as the “state secrets” privilege to try to shut down a lawsuit brought against a Belgium banking cooperative that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the U.S. government, court documents show. […]
BARCLAYS ADMITS BORROWING HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS AT BANK’S EMERGENCY RATE
September 1st, 2007More “technical difficulties” at one of the world’s top banks. Remember the recent Wells Fargo disaster… Via: Guardian: Barclays has been forced to borrow hundreds of millions of pounds from the Bank of England’s emergency lending facility for the second time in a fortnight, it was revealed last night. In a hurried and emotive statement […]
Joel Salatin and Polyface Farms
August 30th, 2007For me, comprehension of the way industrial scale (including “Organic”) food worked was the last straw. Many aspects of politics and society are disturbing, but toxic—and or long distance—food isn’t some theoretical, far out, future threat. The wolf is at the door. It’s right here, right now. The food issue, more than anything else, drove […]
Home Prices: Steepest Decline in Twenty Years
August 29th, 2007Via: Yahoo / AP: U.S. home prices fell 3.2 percent in the second quarter, the steepest rate of decline since Standard & Poor’s began its nationwide housing index in 1987, the research group said Tuesday. The decline in home prices around the nation shows no evidence of a market recovery anytime soon, one of the […]
UNCONFIRMED – Internal Bank of America Memo on Subprime and Alt-A Loans
August 29th, 2007For your Not-News-to-Cryptogon-Readers file… The music has stopped and all the chairs are taken. Via: Calculated Risk: Bank of America’s RMBS Desk has a research note out (not publically available) that attempts to estimate the realistic refinance options, if any, for outstanding subprime ARMs that are facing reset in the immediate future. The analysis looks […]
Inside the Countrywide Swindle
August 28th, 2007Via: New York Times: ON its way to becoming the nation’s largest mortgage lender, the Countrywide Financial Corporation encouraged its sales force to court customers over the telephone with a seductive pitch that seldom varied. “I want to be sure you are getting the best loan possible,†the sales representatives would say. But providing “the […]
Fed Bends Rules to Help Citigroup and Bank of America
August 27th, 2007Via: CNN: In a clear sign that the credit crunch is still affecting the nation’s largest financial institutions, the Federal Reserve agreed this week to bend key banking regulations to help out Citigroup and Bank of America, according to documents posted Friday on the Fed’s web site. The Aug. 20 letters from the Fed to […]
