rcwhalen's blog

On Friday the FDIC reminded us that the banking crisis continues, closing and selling several institutions in arranged transactions.   This may seem gloomy news, but please note that the shareholders of the acquiring institutions just made a lot of money.

But those Shanghai office towers across the river in Pudong were already standing empty a decade ago – not that you would know from any contemporary reporting. Former Prime Minister Rhu Rongji publicly pleaded with provincial bureaucrats to stop fabricating figures because it made it impossible for him to know what was going on.

I continue to believe that the large difference between the valuation of WFC and C is actually about right and is a function of the high-risk business model at C.  Say what you want about the piles of cash, Dick Bove, C has a gross yield on lending assets that is more than 350bp above the industry average, a function of a subprime internal default target for the average customer.  This is a deliberate business model choice and one that, frankly, makes it hard for me to justify buying C. 

Pres. Barack Obama has launched new international diplomatic poker with “a trailing hand”. It is impossible to exaggerate the forces at play, economic as well as political, foreign and domestic, and their interplay.

Analyst surveys have now risen to the level of fact, as we all know.  Thus Bloomberg and other news outlets feature detailed reports about the opinions of the Sell Side community as though these musings were burned into stone tablets with the fire of the Holy Spirit.

Whatever their vitae, dreaming up a buddy relationship [built around Joe Biden] as solution to the troubled U.S.-China relations almost certainly ahead, is, indeed, preposterous. The little soap opera proves, were it not already self-evident, the “lessons” of the Cold War lie buried somewhere in the Library of Congress -- with no remnant at CIA, one surmises.

The new year’s worldwide economic downturn has an interlocking effect: every national economy is searching to accommodate itself politically as well as economically to what looks to be an extended period of low growth. After longer or shorter periods of historically unrivaled prosperity, they are feeling for a “bottom” – a level to wait out new growth. That is the proverbial “soft landing”.

A new era of increasing instability is opening in East Asia.

Latest from Ed Pinto, who piles on the blame the GSEs argument with some new data and analysis in The American, AEI's online magazine. This will not help the cognitive illusion being so skillfully maintained by our friends Ritholtz and Nocera, who still cannot bring themselves to admit that Wall Street runs the GSEs just like a private SIV. Lawyers and first loss exposure is the only difference.

Canadian threats to transfer their affections to the Chinese market might have some validity – although even Chavez is arranging swaps with Iran for his Chinese sales with Venezuelan crude supposedly sold to Beijing flowing into Texas.

The appropriateness of leaking details of material to be discussed at an upcoming FOMC meeting is itself an issue that deserves scrutiny, since the agenda is not available in advance and the substance is covered by confidentiality rules of the FOMC. The only purpose may be to launch trial balloons to see what additional reactions might be garnered to better inform the discussion that will actually take place. Assuming that is the objective, here goes.

Moderation in all things”, said a pre-Christian North African Roman dramatist, Terence [Publius Terentius Afer]. But like so many artists, he latched on to a beautiful artifact but got the logic wrong.

“As the U.S. economy and especially Wall Street and the banks were less and less focused on funding and financing real economic activity jobs, factories, commerce, the rise of the ersatz virtual world of credit faults swaps and over-the-counter derivatives, all of these gray markets—that are unregulated, that are not traded on exchanges, that have no transparency—were really a way for banks to generate income because they could no longer make their money on the real economy,”

What is certain? If you take 1350 US dollars today, you may exchange them for 1000 euros.

Creeping up on the outer edges of Wall Street and The City soothsayers’ economic crystal ball, until now dominated by American and Euro crises, is growing concern about China.