Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn believes that prices of mortgage-backed securities are likely to fall when the Fed eventually begins selling mortgage-backed securities (MBS) from its portfolio, according to a MarketNews International report by Steven K Beckner last Thursday. The report continues: “He gave no indication when that might be. But Kohn, echoing...
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The debate over financial services reform has meandered for weeks without a clear sense of urgency. It would be a huge opportunity lost if our political, regulatory and business leaders cannot craft a credible new regulatory foundation for one of America’s pre-eminent industries. It’s time to set politics and regulatory infighting aside and establish...
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The United States is headed toward a new financial crisis. History gives many examples of countries with high actual and expected money growth, unsustainable budget deficits, and a currency expected to depreciate. Unless these countries made massive policy changes, they ended in crisis. We will escape only if we act forcefully and soon. As...
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Consumer advocates cheered and the financial sector jeered Thursday as a controversial plan to create a federal agency to regulate mortgages, credit cards and other forms of consumer credit cleared a key House of Representatives committee on its way to an uncertain future. The House Financial Services Committee, on a 39-29 mostly party-line vote,...
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The seasonally adjusted number of jobless claims in the week to October 17 rose 2.1 percent or 11,000 to 531,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 520,000, the Labor Department said. It was higher than the 515,000 forecast by most economists. The four-week moving average, which smooths out week-to-week volatility, however fell slightly...
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Federal Reserve Bank of Boston President Eric Rosengren said the U.S. economy is at risk of relapsing into recession after expanding in the second half of 2009. “It’s certainly a risk,” Rosengren said today in an interview with CNBC, when asked about the danger of a relapse. “That’s why we don’t want to take...
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Like Michael Moore, I have a “love story” to tell about capitalism. Unlike Mr. Moore, I’m not trying to fire up the choir or ambush the executive suite. Also, I’m not sure I share the filmmaker’s conspiracy theories about the roots of the financial crisis. Mr. Moore, in an open letter on his Web...
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U.S. economic conditions stabilized or improved modestly in most parts of the country, according to a Federal Reserve report on Wednesday that suggested the economy was slowly clawing out of a recession. In its “Beige Book” of anecdotal reports on the economy, the Fed noted improvement in two of the hardest hit areas —...
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The United States may face a series of asset price bubbles and a rerun of the financial crisis unless it lets the dollar fall “at least” another 25 percent, economist Bernard Connolly said on Tuesday. Because fierce international resistance will likely prevent such a large dollar devaluation, Connolly told Reuters the Federal Reserve may...
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Sooner or later, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, created by Congress to investigate the causes of the recent and ongoing financial crisis, will no doubt examine the technical aspect of the financial collapse — low interest rates, credit default swaps, derivatives, cheap mortgages that ballooned and other factors that almost wrecked the global economy....
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We’ve always been impressed by David Einhorn, the young manager of Greenlight Capital. Einhorn made our Ten To Watch list this past August for his prescient shorting and outspokenness about the shenanigans going on at Lehman. (His fund had been up by more than 20 percent in the first half of this year, fueled...
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Third quarter earnings season is still ongoing but if you read closely into the numbers, fundamentals have barely improved, which stand at odds to the heady valuations arising from this stock market rally. On the bright side, JP Morgan (JPM) and Goldman Sachs (GS) reported blowout earnings. However, trading is the name of their...
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