From the monthly archives:
Here’s a good read over at The Daily Beast on the Obama banking recovery plan (my emphasis added). An excerpt:
“Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and a host of other economists—myself among them—spent the late 1990s yelling at Japanese and other Asian officials to clean up their banking crises. A typical conversation would end with the American [...]
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Normally, I don’t spend much time talking about the regional purchasing managers indices. But the Chicago NAPM index that just hit the tape is noteworthy for its weakness. In fact, it stands out against certain other reports, which appeared to be showing a bit of stabilization and/or pickup in the economy.
The index dropped to 31.4 [...]
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We just got the latest figures (PDF link) from S&P/Case-Shiller on home prices. The 20-city index dropped at a 19% year-over-year rate in January, up from the 18.6% rate of decline reported in December. On a monthly basis, the index fell 2.8%. That was up from the 2.6% drop reported in December and the fastest [...]
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Another driver of today’s carnage is the debt problems at two Generals — General Motors and General Growth Properties. These are two major players in the auto and commercial real estate sectors, respectively, and they’re both in serious debt trouble. We’ll have to see how generous the government and the creditors are in the restructurings [...]
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Once-lofty expectations for the upcoming Group of 20 meeting are heading south in a hurry. U.S. and European policymakers are having trouble agreeing on the proper combination of bank bailouts, economic stimulus, and so on. It’ll be interesting to see how the markets react (in early trading, “risk aversion” trades — stocks down, bonds up, [...]
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You have to love the way this public-private asset purchase plan is constructed. Ingenious how the administration has figured out a way to massively subsidize the banking industry and claim that’s not what it’s doing. This FT article makes clear what is really going on (I have read similar critiques at several other blogs). Here [...]
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In the wake of the failed U.K. auction of 40-year gilts, the bond market is paying close attention to this week’s U.S. Treasury auctions. We’re in the process of selling $98 billion of 2-year, 5-year, and 7-year notes, the biggest weekly sales of longer-term debt in U.S. history. And while I wouldn’t call the 5-year [...]
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The latest Mortgage Bankers Association figures show that lower interest rates continue to light a fire under the refinance market. Thanks to a drop in the average 30-year mortgage rate to 4.63% from 4.89%, the group’s refinance application index jumped 41.5.% to 6,363.2 in the week of March 20 from 4,497.6 a week earlier. That [...]
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There’s some interesting action (if you’ll pardon the pun) over in the U.K. bond market this morning. The government tried to auction off 1.75 billion pounds of 40-year gilts this morning. But demand was extremely weak, with investors only bidding for 1.63 billion pounds.
The failed auction comes as the U.K. government is selling massive amounts [...]
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There are all kinds of views, both positive and negative, on the Geithner toxic asset plan today. You can read the kudos from columnists like Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post and John Berry at Bloomberg. Or you can read critiques from Paul Krugman at the New York Times and the folks at various blogs, [...]
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