It certainly does feel like 2014 all over again, at least in terms of sentiment and the air of a carefree attitude. There are dramatic differences, of course, but with regard to emotion there truly doesn’t seem to be much daylight between now and three years ago. All that was left to cap the comparison was for Greece to take [...]
The entire point of leveraged positions is the margin of safety. That is true on both sides of that equation, as for the provider and the borrower/user. In the most famous examples of collapse, from AIG to LTCM losses were never really the issue. None of them could withstand instead collateral calls to their liquidity reserves. As noted last week, [...]
The link between stock prices and oil has been especially high of late, and that has left quite a few traders and experts stumped. For a good long while any impact from oil was denied as only “transitory” or even helpful to consumers through some sort of “tax cut” effect. In January 2016, however, liquidations appeared regularly in one alongside [...]
Today is the fifth anniversary of Dodd-Frank, the erstwhile government response to assure that the Panic of 2008 does not repeat. It was an ill-advised task to begin with as the panic itself took care of repetition. It is not, and never has been, past panic that should worry our future. Along with the legislation came the Consumer Financial Protection [...]
Despite the fact that the FDIC is largely charged with regulating small, community banks, it’s mixed-in deposit guarantee “insurance” brings the agency into contact with all manner of banks. This includes, of course, the largest firms that dominate in financial areas that have very little to do with banking in its most monetary form. The FDIC’s area of responsibility, in [...]
The long-awaited “clarification” in GSE housing expansion is about due, and coincidentally it will be released at the same time other central agents are getting their work done. So as the global economy falls into at least a changed mood out of complacency and disinterest, suddenly the ECB has its covered bond “purchase” finalized (as if that is any different [...]
Now that home sales have bounced off the winter lows, we can analyze the real estate market outside of the excuses and distractions. There is no question that May’s sales rate was far better than January or February, but once again that is an amazingly low standard of comparison. In fact, May 2014’s SAAR is pretty much the same as [...]
I suppose when your entire task derives from regression-based statistics, there is the tendency to incorporate straight lines into even your own thought patterns. Of course, that leads to self-reinforcing bias and should be canceled by some governing process. Usually that governing process takes the form of applied knowledge (as opposed to math-based knowledge) and plain common sense. In a [...]
To say that Greece is an economic and fiscal mess is to be repetitive. While the imprint of victimization stains much of the economic collapse, it is at least somewhat strongly applicable in the reminder that financialism is a huge strain in the long run. As with nearly everything European since last summer, the whispers run toward recovery even in [...]
The appearance and intensity of uncertainty is in direct proportion to the counter efforts intended to sow content and maintain the idea of control. It amounts to the financial equivalent of a “show of force.” Yet, how often do such forceful demonstrations actually provide comfort? More often than not, participants in that uncertainty interpret the need to show force as [...]
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