Monthly Archives: January 2012

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The Frozen Avalanche

by Mitch Feierstein about 12 years 1 month ago

OK. We know the picture. Europe is in crisis. Italy shivers on the brink of default. The United States has an utterly unsustainable deficit and politicians who can neither rationalize taxes nor cut entitlements. Banks are overleveraged and have their books stuffed with low grade assets. Their capital buffers are made up of nonsenses such […]

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The EFSF: Europe’s Fake Stability Fund

by Mitch Feierstein about 12 years 1 month ago

As this blog has predicted since its inception, S&P has chosen to downgrade numerous European sovereigns, including France and Italy. The former is no longer a AAA-rated country. The latter, tiptoeing towards non-investment grade status. Those downgrades caused relatively little market turbulence for two reasons. First of all, S&P was merely catching up with market […]

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The Court of the Sun King

by Mitch Feierstein about 12 years 2 months ago

Must be nice being Swervyn Mervyn. Nice to be so secure in your job that you can reject any idea of checks and balances on your all-but-supreme power. Nice that ex-Chancellors of the Exchequer view you as some Sun King beyond any check. Nice to have a £400,000 salary and plenty of time to enjoy […]

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Buddy Can You Spare a Franc?

by Mitch Feierstein about 12 years 2 months ago

Better late than never, S&P has just downgraded France (to AA+) as well as slashing its ratings of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Cyprus, Slovenia, Malta and Slovakia. You may remember that Planet Ponzi called this right ages back. Indeed, because this blog hasn’t been going that long, we’d also like to point out that we […]

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How Wrong Can a Wrong Thing Be?

by Mitch Feierstein about 12 years 2 months ago

Just how wrong can a policymaker be? Take this news, that as late as 2006 the Fed managed to miss obvious signs of collapse in the US housing bubble. Although the stats pointed to a once-in-a-century boom which would, unless financial gravity went on holiday, turn into a once-in-a-century bust, somehow those guys at the […]

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The Slow Collapse of Civil Liberties

by Mitch Feierstein about 12 years 2 months ago

It is an extraordinary but true fact that democracy is on the retreat across the ‘free’ world. Italy has a government boasting not one single elected official. The current regime was foisted on the Italian people not by national election but by the will of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. In Greece, the same thing, […]

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Dangerous Driving

by Mitch Feierstein about 12 years 2 months ago

Deep in the bowels of the UK Treasury a plan is being hatched that would create a new crime of corporate negligence. The idea is to make it an offence for the leadership of any systemically important financial institution recklessly to endanger their firms and thereby the economy. That might sound harsh, but it would […]

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What People Do To Get By

by Mitch Feierstein about 12 years 2 months ago

These are sad times. Evidence is constantly accumulating of the damage being done to people’s pay checks by the recession. (And we are of course in that recession now, not waiting for one to come along.) The latest item in this long hall of infamy is this data, reported by the FT, that a million […]

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