Posts Tagged ‘failing banks’
Posted by smeddum on September 22, 2008
Goldman, Morgan Stanley Bring Down Curtain on Wall Street Era
By Christine Harper and Craig Torres
Get your hankies ready and have a good bubble. I can’t believe I said bubble how insensitive. Alas the old days are over, the big bonuses are gone. Somehow I find it hard to believe that Fed regulation will fix things here. What is the Fed? A decentralized central bank, inside the government and independent from it.
Who regulates the regulators?
Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) — The Wall Street that shaped the financial world for two decades ended last night, when Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley concluded there is no future in remaining investment banks now that investors have determined the model is broken. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: failing banks, financial collapse, wall street | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on September 21, 2008
“The Americans can’t make Germany accountable for their failure and their arrogance,” Poss said. “A similar rescue package is neither planned nor needed in Germany,” he added.
Deutsche-Welle
21st September, 2008
German politicians are skeptical about a $700 billion US bailout of markets and of calls to take similar measures as Chancellor Merkel criticized Washington for failing to implement stringent market controls.
A growing chorus of German politicians questioned over the weekend whether the unprecedented US rescue package meant to inject liquidity into the financial system would help to stem the crisis which has sent world markets into a tailspin.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: failing banks, financial collapse | 1 Comment »
Posted by smeddum on September 21, 2008
Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle
The Nation
by WILLIAM GREIDER
September 19, 2008
Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses–many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: bail out swindle, failing banks, financial fraud | 3 Comments »
Posted by smeddum on September 20, 2008
Financial Bailout: America’s Own Kleptocracy
The largest transformation of America’s Financial System since the Great Depression
by Michael Hudson
Global Research,
September 20, 2008
Nobody expected industrial capitalism to end up like this. Nobody even saw it evolving in this direction. I’m afraid this failing is not unusual among futurists: The natural tendency is to think about how economies can best grow and evolve, not how it can be untracked. But an unforeseen road always seems to appear, and there goes society goes off on a tangent. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by smeddum on September 20, 2008
The Point of No Return
By Mike Whitney
19/09/08 “ICH” — – Following another eratic day of trading on the stock market, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke convened an emergency meeting of the Senate Banking Committee and other congressional leaders to request fast-track authority for a sweeping plan to buy back illiquid assets and other complex securities from distressed and under-capitalized banks. The turbulence in the financial markets has intensified and there is every indication that the situation will get worse before it gets better. There are a number of signs that the financial system is at the brink of collapse and that Wall Street is headed for a 1929-type crash. Depositors have begun to withdrawal their savings from money market funds alarmed by the gyrations in the market and the daily deluge of bad economic news. According to the Washington Post, funds dropped “by at least $79 billion, or about 2.6 percent” on Wednesday alone. The withdrawals are the equivalent of a slow bank run just at the time when stressed commercial banks need access to cheap capital to finance daily operations and provide loans for a steadily weakening economy. There’s also been a surge of panic-buying of US Treasurys which is considered the safest of investments. According to the Wall Street Journal, during Wednesday’s market-rout, “investors were willing to pay more for one-month Treasurys than they could expect to get back when the bonds matured. Some investors, in essence, had decided that a small but known loss was better than the uncertainty connected to any other type of investment. That’s never happened before.” (Wall Street Journal) Also, the VIX, or “fear gauge”, has soared to levels not seen since the crisis began in August just over a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by smeddum on September 19, 2008
L.A Times
Hey U.S., welcome to the Third World!
It’s been a quick slide from economic superpower to economic basket case.
Rosa Brooks
September 18, 2008
Dear United States, Welcome to the Third World!
It’s not every day that a superpower makes a bid to transform itself into a Third World nation, and we here at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund want to be among the first to welcome you to the community of states in desperate need of international economic assistance. As you spiral into a catastrophic financial meltdown, we are delighted to respond to your Treasury Department’s request that we undertake a joint stability assessment of your financial sector. In these turbulent times, we can provide services ranging from subsidized loans to expert advisors willing to perform an emergency overhaul of your entire government.
As you know, some outside intervention in your economy is overdue. Last week — even before Wall Street’s latest collapse — 13 former finance ministers convened at the University of Virginia and agreed that you must fix your “broken financial system.” Australia’s Peter Costello noted that lately you’ve been “exporting instability” in world markets, and Yashwant Sinha, former finance minister of India, concluded, “The time has come. The U.S. should accept some monitoring by the IMF.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: failing banks, IMF, wall street | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on September 19, 2008
Hedge funds could be next victim Montreal Gazette
PETER HADEKEL
Freelance
Friday, September 19, 2008
One wag at a financial conference here yesterday likened the current chaos in the markets to a TV reality show.
Working title: Survivor Wall Street.
Investors are wondering who will survive the brutal shakeout now under way and who will be voted down in the market panic that has spread over the last two weeks. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: failing banks, hedge funds | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on September 19, 2008
Irish Independent
This is the beginning of a new epoch, if you would a new times, the dog eat dog system is sharpening its teeth, streamlining its pyramid structure, leaving casualties everywhere. Yet there is fear that the system itself cannot hold, as chaos makes for much unpredictability. Commentaries are becoming sharper and sharper. Let us bring them to you here at inthesenewtimes.com
Ignorance might be bliss; but most of all, it is ignorance. It is the utterly sublime quality of not knowing, of not having the faintest clue – as in the case of Bernard Weiss, the deputy commissioner of the Berlin police. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: failing banks, Ireland, nazis, wall street, Wall street crash | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on September 19, 2008
What Moral Hazard? Forbes
LONDON – It’s been bailout out after bailout for Wall Street banks that made ill-judged bets on the securities market, but the so-called moral-hazard theory, that banks will be all the more reckless for it, has been discarded by those watching overseas this past week. In Europe, where central bankers are typically hawkish and regulators keep an especially wary eye on state meddling in business, everybody seems glad for Fed interference. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: failing banks, moral hazard, Western hypocrisy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on September 19, 2008
This is a hint at the extraordinary costs of public backing for the nascent private banking cartel. The price of this will be payed by all of us through taxation, cuts and, above all, inflation as the pound goes on falling( we are an import dependent economy). The vultures and parasites who fleeced the world for so long have come home to roost and pick the imperial heartland to the bone.
Ashley Seager
Guardian
19th September, 2008
The public finances suffered yet another lurch into the red last month amid warnings of a record deficit this year that would force the next government to raise taxes or cut spending – or possibly both.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: failing banks, financial collapse, UK government debt | 2 Comments »
Posted by smeddum on September 18, 2008
The Scent of Fear
AIG’s Rotten Paper Could Bring the House Down
by WILLIAM GREIDER The Nation
September 17, 2008
For the first time in this unfolding financial crisis, I felt personally scared by the news. Not about my money, but about the potential for catastrophe. The Federal Reserve’s lightning rescue of AIG has the smell of systemic fear. The house of global finance is on fire and everyone is running for the exits, no sure way to turn them around. What’s next? The question itself is ominous, because there are no good answers. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: AIg, Banks in crisis, failing banks | Leave a Comment »
In These New Times 