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Monday, September 15, 2008

Meanwhile, in other economic news...
Posted by Jill | 6:55 AM
The value of Washington Mutual has plummeted 75% since March, so it is now worth just above what J.P. Morgan Chase offered to buy it back then. Now WaMu may be the next bank to go.

Bank shares are plummeting in Europe today.

Greed, greed, greed. Last night I wrote about Lehman Bros. head John Fuld's golden parachute? This is what he did to earn this huge reward.

Heckuva job, Paulie.

Nouriel Roubini may be derided as a Cassandra by the Larry Kudlows of the world, but he's been right on the money on the collapse of the broker-dealers, and he weighs in now on what this all means:
What we are facing now if the beginning of the unraveling and collapse of the entire shadow financial system, a system of institutions (broker dealers, hedge funds, private equity funds, SIVs, conduits, etc.) that look like banks (as they borrow short, are highly leveraged and lend and invest long and in illiquid ways) and thus are highly vulnerable to bank like runs; but unlike banks they are not properly regulated and supervised, they don’t have access to deposit insurance and don’t have access to the lender of last resort support of the central bank (with now only a small group of them having access to the limited and conditional and thus fragile support of the Fed). So no wonder that this shadow banking system is now collapsing. The entire conduits/SIV system has already collapsed with the roll-off of their ABCP financing; next is the collapse of the broker dealers (Bear, Lehman and soon enough the other ones) that rely mostly on unstable overnight repos and other very short term funding for their financing; next will be hundreds of poorly managed hedge funds that will face a tsunami of redemptions; and finally runs on money market funds that are not supported by a large financial institutions or other smaller member of the shadow banking system as well as highly leveraged and distressed private equity funds cannot be ruled out either.

This is indeed the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression and occurring at a time when the US is falling in a now severe consumer led recession. The vicious interaction between a systemic financial and banking crisis and a severe economic contraction will get much worse before there is any bottom to it. We are only in the third inning of a nine innings economic and financial crisis. And the only light at the end of the tunnel is the one of the incoming train wreck.

Roubini appeared on Bloomberg TV on Friday. Embedding is disabled, but you can watch it here.

The First Bank of Sealy Posturepedic is looking better every day.

So what's this week going to be then. Are we going to continue to have the vapors over the uppity Negro (sic) "disrespecting" the flower of White Christian Womanhood, or are we going to look at what eight years of Republican "leadership" has done to our country?

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3 Comments:
Blogger Citizen Carrie said...
I'd like to think that after the crash, Wall Street will have learned its lesson and sanity will prevail. I fear instead that, as we speak, people are cooking up even more bizarre financial schemes in the back room to suck up every last bit of savings we'll be able to hang onto.

At least with the S&L crisis, the average American could understand what was happening.
9/15/08, 11:40 AM  
Blogger D. said...
Eight years plus an enabling eight years plus twelve years before that.

[Your choice of bad language here.]
9/15/08, 12:46 PM  
Blogger D. said...
I forgot that deregulation fever began in the late '70s. Add 2-3 more years to that total.

Conservatism is the party of fiscal irresponsibility. Remember that as long as you live.
9/15/08, 2:16 PM  
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