Category: Credit Crisis 2008
The analysis published under this category are as follows.Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Lessons from Lehman's Collapse 10 Years After Failing / Stock-Markets / Credit Crisis 2008
Global financial services firm Lehman Brother’s stock was in free-fall during the first week of September 2008. After making huge bets in the mortgage securities space, Lehman’s President Dick Fuld feared bankruptcy and frantically sought out a buyer. The company was hopeful to strike a weekend deal with either Barclays PLC or Bank of America.
Nevertheless, Lehman’s outsized investments in the mortgage market ultimately proved them too risky a partner for anyone; and the giant investment bank went belly-up on September 15th. Prior to this event, Lehman had reported record earnings every year from 2005 to 2007. The Street believed the company to be infallible. Analysts held on to hope until the bitter end. Their mantra went something like this, “nothing to see here, this is a small correction in a small section of the housing market that has little effect on the overall economy.”
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Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Is Simple Incompetence The Real Source Of Crises? / Stock-Markets / Credit Crisis 2008
There are two quite different narratives for explaining the financial crisis of 2008, the resulting Great Recession and the chances for a new crisis. The first narrative revolves around theory and jargon. It's Keynesian versus Austrian economics, it is societal debt levels, it is fractional reserve lending and the velocity of money, and so forth.
There is a much simpler perspective, which is that no matter how exalted the credentials or how elevated the position, at the end of the day we're all human. Which means we're all vulnerable to getting in over our heads and just plain screwing up. And if these mistakes – which effectively result from our not being as good as we think we are – occur at a high enough level, then that has the potential to change economies and investment returns for entire nations, as well as the global financial order, and sometimes for decades to come.
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Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Gold and Silver Margin Call - The Real Reason for Bear Stearns Collapse / Commodities / Credit Crisis 2008
Ted Butler has put one of his newsletters into the public domain.
It raises some interesting points. As you may recall Bear was suffering losses in a number of financial instruments at the time. But there has not been serious discussion about their precious metal positions.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Credit Meltdown Transcripts - It's All in the Flows / Politics / Credit Crisis 2008
The 2007 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) transcripts were released last week. Media reports have concentrated on the Fed's forbearance during the credit meltdown. Implied, but not stated (in what I have read) is the major reason for such nonchalance: The Fed only acknowledges flows, not stocks. This might sound boring. It is also very important to understand.
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Sunday, June 12, 2011
A Beginners Guide to Shadow Banking, Financial Crisis and Repo / Politics / Credit Crisis 2008
What if I told you that the financial crisis could be explained in just two words? Would you believe me?It's true, and oddly enough, neither of the words is "subprime".
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Monday, May 30, 2011
HBO’s 'Too Big to Fail', A Fascist Fairy Tale / Politics / Credit Crisis 2008
Jens C. Kolbjørnsen writes: "Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power." ~ Benito Mussolini
Now that we are pushing the three years anniversary of the dramatic financial events of September 2008, it is fair to say, for anyone who has researched the subject on their own, that this movie is nothing but a popularization of the mainstream version of a crisis that only has been postponed and worsened. It portrays the criminals of the revolving door between Washington D.C. and Wall Street as heroes, without so much as touching upon the real reason for the boom and bust phenomenon.
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Tuesday, May 10, 2011
How Iceland Became Paperland / Economics / Credit Crisis 2008
Andy Duncan writes: If you believe in a Creator, then you must acknowledge that He (or She) possesses an incredible sense of humor. Without this, how do you explain Iceland?
Fortunately for us, and particularly perhaps for the Irish, the Greeks, and the Portuguese, this deific challenge is detailed gloriously in the new book, Deep Freeze: Iceland's Economic Collapse, written by Professors Philipp Bagus and David Howden, which is freely downloadable for your Kindle or iBook pleasure via the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
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Wednesday, April 06, 2011
When Iceland Totally Froze / Economics / Credit Crisis 2008
Following the bankruptcy of the American investment bank Lehman Brothers in late 2008, credit markets all over the world seized up in a striking manifestation of the interconnectivity of the global economy. When the dust had settled, the crisis had wiped out trillions of dollars of investments, and the previously well-functioning credit markets had stalled. The most spectacular bankruptcy of the 2008 financial crisis was the collapse of Iceland's financial system. This collapse is especially intriguing as Iceland is not an underdeveloped country (it ranked third in the United Nations' 2009 Human Development Index).
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Tuesday, October 26, 2010
How Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Fleeced America and Spwaned Global Financial Crisis / Housing-Market / Credit Crisis 2008
I am in New York this afternoon attending and speaking at the Bank Credit Analyst Conference. I have to say that the panel on emerging markets gave me some real food for thought and an idea or two for a future e-letter. I have been a fan of emerging markets in general (with some exceptions) for some time but I should become even more so I think.
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Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The Largest Heist in History Building the Great Pyramid, The Global Financial Crisis Explained / Stock-Markets / Credit Crisis 2008
Greg Pytel writes: When the financial crisis erupted at the end of September 2008, there was an unusual sense of incredible panic among banking executives and government officials. These two establishment groups are known for their conservative, understated approach and, above all, their stiff upper lip. Yet at the time they appeared to the public running about like headless chickens. It was chaos. A state of complete chaos. Within a few weeks, however, decisions were made and everything seemed to returned to normal and back under control. The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown even famously remarked that the government “saved the world.”
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Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Prelude to Meltdown: An interview with Bert Dohmen / Stock-Markets / Credit Crisis 2008
When Bert Dohmen talks, smart investors listen.In 2007 when most investment analysts and economists were downplaying the developing credit market troubles, Bert warned investors that the probability was very high that the troubles would escalate into full-blown crisis and would produce a crash of historic proportions. He chronicled the developing credit crisis in the pages of his newsletter and also published a book in early 2008, Prelude to Meltdown, which provided his insightful views on the emerging crisis in depth. The book will surely go down as a landmark written by a financial visionary who was several steps ahead of his peers.
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Thursday, July 15, 2010
Banking Industry Crisis, INSIDE JOB The Movie / Politics / Credit Crisis 2008
Having a day out in the big city of Auckland with an old Buddie who is an accountant, we decided to paint the town red and so we went to the Auckland Film Festival to catch a couple of movies one of which is entitled ‘Inside Job‘
Its an all star cast which includes, Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama along with the usual suspects Bernanke and Geithner, some eminent Professors of Colombia and Harvard University who did not cover themselves in glory and the rating agencies who failed miserably in their assessments of the banking industry.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The Insidious Transformation of Markets Into Casinos, How Financial Brokers Became Bookies / Politics / Credit Crisis 2008
"You all are the house, you're the bookie. [Your clients] are booking their bets with you. I don't know why we need to dress it up. It's a bet." - Senator Claire McCaskill, Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, investigating Goldman Sachs (Washington Post, April 27, 2010)
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Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The Big Short – How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street / Politics / Credit Crisis 2008
Day after day, bankers have been paraded before Congressional committees regarding their role in the financial crisis which brought the financial system to the edge of the abyss on September 18, 2008. Every one has claimed that they were not responsible in any way for the disaster. They blame once in a lifetime circumstances that no one could have anticipated. It was a perfect storm and they had no way of knowing. These Harvard MBA Wall Street geniuses, who collected compensation in excess of $100 million each before the collapse, had no idea what was going on within their own firms. Ignorance and stupidity is no excuse for losing a trillion dollars.Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Profiting From Shorting America, Inside The Doomsday Machine / Stock-Markets / Credit Crisis 2008
Ask the average guy on the street — Main or Wall — about what caused the meltdown on Wall Street in 2008, and you might get "greed," or "arrogance," or "too much leverage," or "too little regulation," or a blank stare. After all, the arcane world of mortgage securities was new. After the dot-com bust, Wall Street needed products to make money on. And with middle Americans figuring they could collectively get rich just by taking title to a home with no money down and watching the value climb to the heavens (extracting money to maintain their lifestyles along the way), well, that's what Wall Street's all about: something for nothing.
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Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Lehman's Bankruptcy Report, Evidence of a Financial Coup in America / Companies / Credit Crisis 2008
“The ideas of economists… are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” — John Maynard Keynes
How much more evidence of a financial coup and the THEFT of TRILLIONS of DOLLARS do we need before the media and our politicians do something, anything, to restore a rule of law in this nation? What is it going to take?
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Geithner and Bernanke's Possibly Criminal Roles in Lehman's Scandal / Politics / Credit Crisis 2008
After a year-long investigation, court-appointed bank examiner Anton Valukas has produced a deadly 2,200 page report which details the activities that led to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The report is a keg of dynamite. The question now is whether anyone in government has the nerve to light the fuse. Valukas provides powerful evidence that Lehman executives were involved in “balance sheet manipulation” by implementing an arcane accounting procedure called “Repo 105” which masked the bank's true financial condition from investors and regulators.
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010
What Caused the Financial Crisis, Delusion or Crime? Critique of Michael Lewis / Politics / Credit Crisis 2008
The Big Short Is A Bit Short In Missing The Reasons for The Crisis: Michael Lewis’s Delusion Thesis vs Senator Kaufman’s Case for Crime
It’s the number one book in the county. Every day, Michael Lewis’s the Big Short is getting B I G G E R, no doubt because he is so mediagenic, conversational and likes to laugh with the hosts who interview him about his findings.
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Sunday, March 14, 2010
The Greatest Financial Crime Ever Perpetrated, This Video Could Put Geithner Behind Bars / Politics / Credit Crisis 2008
You gotta see this! If this doesn't convince you that the Timothy Geithner knew about the securities shenanigans that were going on at Lehman, than I don't know what will.
Keep in mind, that Geithner ran Lehman through 3 "stress tests" prior to bankruptcy; all of which Lehman failed, and yet, nothing was done. Anton R. Valukas--the examiner who wrote the 2,200 page investigative-report which was released on Thursday-- has provided plenty of information detailing Lehman's “materially misleading” accounting and “actionable balance sheet manipulation.”
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Friday, March 12, 2010
Lehman’s Contribution to the Financial Meltdown! / Companies / Credit Crisis 2008
Sometimes things that seem too disappointing to be true do turn out to be true. Unfortunately over the decades that has happened too often in the financial industry.
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