Category Credit crisis

This is the new Much Worse. As contrasted with previous upward revisions in the amount of money that banks will be losing, which were a mere $400 billion or so, the new number is $1.6 trillion. This from a “confidential…

From Alan Abelson’s weekly column in Barron’s It increasingly looks “like the evermore freewheeling financial environment that we’ve taken for granted for the last 25 years is behind us.” Or, as the [Bank for International Settlements] declaims “has run its…

An individual bond is rated based on the rating of the company that insures it. A bizarro concept, when you think about it. Shouldn’t a bond be rated on its own merits? But they aren’t. This cozy system worked fine,…

An attempted stock market rally yesterday failed. An analyst said a bankruptcy of GM is possible. Oil hit another all time high. Bad moon rising. Disclosure: I own puts on financials.

I was emailing a friend recently about the stock market. He thinks the markets are “totally divorced from the reality of the time” and in many ways he’s right. They exist in a bizarre other universe, seemingly not affecting the…