Rokjok777

U.S. Handling of Financial Crisis - A Less Optimistic View

I was a hardened Dem from California so I was in favor of Obama over McCain/Palin. But Obama's inexperience is showing. He trusts "experts": how to fix Wall St? Ask Summers & Geithner! What to do about Afghanistan? Ask the generals! Well, of course they're gonna say "yeah just give us thousands of more troops and plenty of more bombs and billions of dollars, it'll all be great!"
As I say, I used to be a hardened Dem from California, now I'm a sunburned Aussie from Sydney...

Six Things to Learn from the Financial Crisis

Lesson one: don't invest in something yu don't understand. Bank balance sheets fall into that category, along with CMOs;
2. Don't fight the Fed;
3. The trend is your friend to the end;
4. "markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

How Globalization Led to Universal Banking in America

Edward - Ignore the naysayers, especially Jeff Nielsen, who doesn't even know what "disintermediation" is.
This is a brilliant history lesson. I've worked in banking for nearly 30 years and you have summarized the narrative in the industry perfectly. Hats off to you for writing such a clear and concise history.
I especially like the line about "..self-regulatory nonsense of the last generation..."
Where do we go from here? I think somewhere hopefully at a goodly distance from such "self-regulatory nonsense". I moved to Australia a few years back, and the banks here, as in Canada, are doing fine. They have a prudent regulatory regime in place, none of this Fox News drivel about "..just get the government out of the way blah blah blah..". Imagine where America would be today had such a regime been in place: several trillion dollars richer. The real economy was rolling along along until the Wall Street Casino operators blew it and like the Mafia they are, held a gun to Uncle Sam's head and said "gimme the money".
Great article.

Financial Times Debunks Citi's Memo

Nobody seems to mention that C, JPM, and BAC have something like $1.7 *trillion* in customer funds on deposit so the Feds CANNOT let them fail because the FDIC is also very near broke. So Obama (and yes I did vote for him) with spectacularly bad advice from Tim Geithner and Helicopter Ben, has decided to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and hope the iceberg melts. Look out below!

Credit Markets Take a Beating

The whisper in the UK is that the major accounting firms can't sign off on their year-end audits of the banks there. Because they are insolvent.