by Linda Bealecrossposted at Ataxingmatter From offshore accounts of individuals to transfer pricing scams of corporations From offshore accounts of individuals to transfer pricing scams of corporationsMichigan’s Levin says the next big thing for the government to focus on, now that the offshore accounting schemes of individual taxpayers have gotten its full attention, should be […]
The opening chapter of Jack Cashill’s Popes and Bankers relates his version of the tale of Melonie Griffith-Evans, a woman who in 2004 borrowed her way to losing her house. Ms. Griffith-Evans accepted loans in order to buy a house priced at $470,000 that resulted in her having to pay “roughly $3,500 a month.” Of […]
Sometimes, I hate being right. Most of those times are when I take a pessimistic view of data; this has happened a lot recently. It gets worse when the people who agree with you are none other than The Giant Vampire Squid. As the Wall Street Journal notes: Zero — First quarter GDP growth, minus […]
When you need to understand something, look to the comics for the best explainations. And a this sketch on the subprime problem.
Round One to the Banks, More to Come writes Robert Weissman: On the Wall Street reform bill, the Senate, late last Thursday, rejected probably the most important measure proposed to reduce Wall Street power, strengthen financial stability and fortify our democracy: breaking up the banks. By a 33-61 vote, the Senate defeated the Brown-Kaufman amendment, […]
Marshall Auerback is a Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and Braintruster at the New Deal 2.0. By Marshall Auerback To paraphrase Shakespeare, things are indeed rotten in the State of Denmark (and Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and almost everywhere else in the euro zone). An entire continent appears determined to commit collective hara kiri, […]
(hat tip ilene at Phil’s World) Lounsbury at Seekingalpha points us to another aspect of the nature of this recovery. The Philadephia Fed provides statistics on Concident Indexes for March.
One of the things that goes without saying these days is that a recovery doesn’t lift all boats. It doesn’t lift all banks, either. For your consideration, the number and documented costs (in $MM) of bank closings in the U.S. since 2000.
Robert Waldmann Alex Tabarrok wrote In Too Big To Save Robert Pozen gives a clever example, based on an excellent paper by Coval, Jurek and Stafford, which explains both the lure of structured finance and why the model exploded so quickly. Suppose we have 100 mortgages that pay $1 or $0. The probability of default […]