The first Economic Summit meeting of the so-called BRIC group of Emerging Market nations — Brazil, Russia, India and China — and it is intended to underscore the rising economic, political and military might of these four major developing countries and their rising chorus demanding a greater voice in global matters.
Nobel winning Columbia University economist, and former World Bank president Joseph E. Stiglitz examines how Wall Street’s culture of ‘cowboy capitalism’ and its risk-taking propensities have ruined the American brand of capitalism. He is featured in the July 2009 issue of Vanity Fair magazine.
The Obama administration is set to release its propsed new regulatory scheme for the U.S. financial system coming off the heels of the changes agreed upon by world leaders at the London G-20 Summit in April.
Discussion of U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s trip to China this week, and the Economy Foreign Policy interests of both nations are dependent upon each other as China seeks to create a greater role for its currency, the Yuan (renmienbi) at the expense of the U.S. greenback.
Moral Hazard, the idea that companies will engage in highly risky behavior that jeopardizes the system that they otherwise would, when they are aware that “too big to fail” assurances of government bailout shifts the burden to taxpayers. Because of this dilemma, companies ought to be allowed to fail as a necessary trauma of capitalim.
Here’s an interesting development that I missed earlier this month, but remains very relevant: It appears the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a regional group of middle-eastern Arab states have agreed tentatively to create a central monetary council that will evolve into a new Gulf Central Bank representing middle-east Arab states. Not surprisingly, the largest member […]
…Drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry.” Those words ring with such prophetic irony now – that is if the levy had been retaining a history of American automobile prowess. Or that’s at least what one might feel after reading Kendra Marr’s 18 May Washington Post article titled, “As […]
Interesting article by noted economic historian Niall Ferguson from the New York Times magazine, Sun 17 May 2009.
Elizabeth Warren of the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) and Arianna Huffington, Founder of HuffPo share uncanny, common sense clarity and insight on financial markets crisis. They get it.
FDIC Chairperson Sheila Bair indicated today (May 15, 2009) in a Bloomberg TV interview that mismanagement by bank executives and their boards of directors will come under the scrutiny of bank regulators as they try to repair the U.S. financial system.
The fact that government regulators are frimly in control of capital markets is true not only in the U.S., but in fact that reality is de pase in most other developed markets around the world.
Once again, comics and the artisans of comedy are the best truth-tellers. The Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart proved brialliant earlier this year in calling-out CNBC’s so-called “ahead of the curve” financial “news” personalities for their abscense of accountability in the lede up to the banking crisis and the global economic crisis that followed. Now, Saturday Night Live (SNL) deadpanned U.S. […]
In global markets around the world, the free market is being challenged by the rise of ‘State Capitalism’ — a system in which the state through regulatory reforms to check the excesses of greed & volatility becomes the leading economic actor. With the Feds set to announce the outcome of the bank stress tests this week, the ‘nationalization’ of U.S. banks, in some form, seems inevitable. Is state capitalism the future of 21st-century capitalism?
Gary Shilling on Bloomberg: bank stress test analysis. According to reports from the New York Times (NYT) here, and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) here, the Federal Reserve with the backing of the U.S. Treasury, directed at least ten of 19 of the nation’s largest banks to bolster their balance sheet capital ratio levels by $75 […]
Ten of 19 of the nation’s largest banks failed the Fed stress test, and will require more capital or face the possibility of insolvency or receivership (i.e., ‘Nationalization’).