Bailout and Financial Crisis News

Carolyn Said at the San Francisco Chronicle writes: Short sale tax shortchanges ex-homeowners (ht picosec) California legislators last week passed a bill that … mirrors a federal law that excludes “forgiven debt” on a principal residence from being considered taxable income. It covers short sales, foreclosures, deeds in lieu of foreclosure and loan modifications that [...]

From Reuters: Capital One Credit Card Defaults Fall, but BofA’s Rise Capital One said the annualized net charge-off rate — debts the company believes it will never collect — for U.S. credit cards fell to 10.19 percent in February from 10.41 percent in January. … However, Bank of America said its defaults rate rose in February, up [...]

It has been a month since Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister and chairman of the 16 euro-zone finance ministers, said that Greece had until March 16th to show progress on their budget. The euro-zone finance ministers meet this week, and apparently Greece has meet the short term goals. From Reuters: Euro finance ministers [...]

The NY Times Deal Book has posted the Lehman’s examiners report online: Court-Appointed Lehman Examiner Unveils Report There is an interesting excerpt on the apparent use of repo transactions to bolster Lehman’s balance sheet: … former Global Financial Controller Martin … Kelly believed “that the only purpose or motive for the transactions was reduction in balance sheet”; [...]

In the summer of 2008, Pali Capital’s co-founders, Brad Reifler and Bert Cohen started fighting over their boutique bank. Cohen and other large shareholders had launched a plan to oust Reifler from Pali, according to a new report in Reuters. And Reifler was not happy. According to the lawsuit, he sent Cohen emails calling Cohen “a bitter [...]

Jürgen Stark, Member of the Executive Board, European Central Bank, spoke at the NABE Economic Policy Conference that is being held in Arlington, Va. Stark’s talk was titled: “Is the Global Economy Headed for a Lost Decade? A European Perspective”. From MarketWatch: ‘Lost decade’ possible for global economy, ECB’s Stark says “The failure to address long-overdue [...]

There is a long tradition on this blog of “picking on poor Gretchen” - mostly from Tanta, but I’ve added a little. Anyone who follows the above link, please scroll down for Tanta’s pieces. Gretchen’s column today is another … doozy. Luckily others have beat me to this one. From Felix Salmon at Reuters: The NYT jumps [...]

A few quotes: From Dow Jones: Zhou Signals Yuan Policy Shift “We don’t rule out that during some special periods–such as the Asian Financial crisis and the global financial crisis this time–we adopted special policies, including a special exchange rate mechanism,” [China central bank Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan] said at a news briefing during the annual session of [...]

1) Andrew Leigh: Permanent Income Inequality: Australia, Britain, Germany, and the United States Compared: This paper uses panel data from four developed nations to estimate permanent income inequality, measured by averaging equivalized household income across multiple years. In general, I find that permanent income inequality has followed similar trends to annual income inequality, rising particularly [...]

Greece just announced cuts of $6.6 billion from its budget. Victory, right! Not so fast. If this was all it took to get a bailout from the rest of Europe, then why is the country’s prime minister making not-so-veiled threats to the EU via the media. In this case, Reuters reports that Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou [...]

« Previous entries