Memnison Journal

I’m really tired of the rumbledy-toss of big banks buying small fry – and then going under due to hilarity at the home office. We use two banks and a credit union; the latter is WAY out of state, and I’d transfer over to that except that we’d never have a local bank. Bank #1 [...]

AP has a map here (interactive flash) on local economic conditions; my home county (DuPage) has (in the last two years) seen unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies double, and we’re nowhere near the bottom.  Check it out.

The inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reports that five SEC exams and investigations of Bernie Madoff were incompetently done.   I can believe one screwup happened, but five?  Five is agency policy to not look too hard. Both Markopolos and an SEC staff accountant testified that it was clear the Boston office’s [...]

Michael Lewis, one of my all-time favorite writers on Wall Street and high-end finance, has a Vanity Fair article on the fall of AIG that I thoroughly recommend. And yet the A.I.G. F.P. traders left behind, much as they despise him personally, refuse to believe Cassano was engaged in any kind of fraud. The problem [...]

Eddie Bauer goes bankrupt. “Now you have too many stores chasing shoppers who are more cash- and credit-constrained than any time post-World War II,” said retail consultant Burt Flickinger III, managing director of Strategic Resource Group. No kidding.

Daniel Larison on the state of the Republican Party and why (read the whole thing): One the reasons why the GOP has so little credibility left is that its members and its spokesmen spent the better part of the fall concocting exaggerated, if not absolutely ridiculous, narratives that put all of the blame for the [...]

It’s interesting that Major League Baseball turns out to be more on top of fraud than the SEC.   But that’s because baseball is important.

Highly interesting summary of what sort of jiggery-pokery was going on in the financial markets in the last twenty or so years, and especially in the Dubya era. As one commenter put it: The finance industry grew faster than the economy as a whole by creating a lot of paper assets. And this: It was [...]

I was asked about this earlier today at a family gathering; my understanding is that Chrysler’s only option is to go to Fiat for life support and that the government will assist *somewhat* in that arrangement, and that GM is going to go into some kid of para-bankruptcy, where it will be split into NEW [...]

I’ve been reading up on the Geithner Plan and other stuff related to it, and while I share the general levels of outrage of the present situation, I think Ezra Klein may have something in his analysis of the situation; that Obama and Geithner are more interested in how to handle the long road on [...]

After looking at this and this, my call is that the overbuilt housing market is going to end up with a longer term situation of people picking up distressed properties because they’re available and filling in the gaps that way.  Prices will not bottom out, I think, below roughly where they were before insanity took [...]

During all of the thrash over the refinancing, it was interesting to revisit the ‘value’ of the house in the market: The start of the graph was when we bought it, and the present is the end of the graph; the assessed value (according to the lender) is slightly under that point.  Which means that [...]

After several days of thrashing, I managed to get things moving in a big way on our house refinance; the new contractors got their stuff to the guys at the energy-audit firm, and the energy-audit firm expects to have the final report available to ship to the lenders tomorrow (Friday).  *glyph of great relief* This [...]

I’m confused, folks.  Which side is the Republican leadership on; the side that wants to work over Wall Street, or the side that wants to Let Greedheads Free? If you’re wanting to discuss the whole AIG matter rationally, I have some reading assignments for you:  Numerian at the Agonist, Ezra Klein at the American Prospect, [...]

Sen Grassley thinks that bankers and other Wall Street idiots and swindlers need to redeem their lost honor by committing suicide. Watch this video Then watch this video Then start singing: “Sepppuku! Seppulu! (dahdahdadadadah) Sep-pu-ku!“  Imagining a lot of Bankers with briefcases dancing around, dropping the briefcases, getting out of the suits and into simple [...]