From the category archives:

Credit

Deflation is real and it’s spreading

by Constantine von Hoffman on April 23, 2009

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!So far Spain, Ireland and the UK are already seeing it and Japan is teetering on the brink.

“Ireland, struggling with a ballooning budget deficit and record unemployment, has been at the vanguard of Europe’s economic collapse. Now deflation threatens [...]

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Rule change lets banks set the value of their own toxic assets

by Constantine von Hoffman on April 2, 2009

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has approved a new set of rules allowing financial firms to fiddle with how big their real-estate losses are.
The change is in mark-to-market accounting rules, which say companies must value assets at prices reflecting current market conditions. But now the phrase “current market conditions” will have a big asterisk [...]

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New game lets you get a bonus and a bailout for screwing up the bank

by Constantine von Hoffman on March 26, 2009

“Crunch, The Game For Utter Bankers” is a card game for anyone with a distinctly gallows sense of humor:
[It] allows you to experience the upside of down. Placed in the role of a global banking CEO, you have to juggle the conflicting demands of your ailing bank and your flourishing bank account. … Each player [...]

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Spike in existing home sales mostly fueled by foreclosures

by Constantine von Hoffman on March 23, 2009

The nearly 500-point dead-cat-bounce on Wall Street yesterday was credited in part to the reported increase in existing home sales. The headline about homes: resales rose 5.1% to a 4.72 million annual rate from 4.49 million in January, via the National Association of Realtors.
The devil rested in the details which showed that 45% of that [...]

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“Borrowers are increasingly taking advantage of the low mortgage rates available in the market today,” said Tom Lund, Executive Vice President, Single-Family Mortgage Business for Fannie Mae and one of four top execs recieving retention bonuses. “We anticipate that volumes will increase even more as millions of additional homeowners become eligible to refinance under the [...]

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The simple way to tell the truth from the spin on fixing the banks

by Constantine von Hoffman on March 10, 2009

There’s way more chaff than wheat in the air when it comes to understanding what’s wrong with the banks. Because of this it can be easy to get caught up in jargon and sound-bites and lose track of what the issues really are.
Two National Public Radio entities are doing a superb job at managing the [...]

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Bernanke offers consumers $200B of what they don’t want

by Constantine von Hoffman on March 3, 2009

How deaf is Ben Bernanke? With the US savings rate hitting a 14-year-high, the Fed unveils a $200B plan “aimed at boosting the availability of credit to consumers and small businesses.” While I hope this will be of use to businesses in need of it, consumers have already made it clear they’re not interested.
As Morgan [...]

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Are Credit Scores Obsolete?

by Cyndi Lopez on February 4, 2009

“Credit is a system whereby a person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay.” – Charles Dickens

In this current economy where foreclosures, unemployment, bankruptcies and consumer credit defaults are reaching epic levels, are credit scores irrelevant?
A credit score is a numerical expression based on a statistical analysis [...]

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Analyst warns of US depression & China implosion

by Constantine von Hoffman on January 15, 2009

Yep, it’s so bad some companies are actually resorting to telling the truth.
Société Générale says it expects the United States’ economy  to enter a depression and that China’s economy in in danger of  imploding. Albert Edwards, an analyst for the European financial services giant, wrote:
While economic data in developed economies increasingly reflects depression rather than [...]

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Facebook used to deliver foreclosure notice

by Jay Hammond on December 24, 2008

Would your friends foreclose on you? Maybe. Maybe not. Unfortunately, your friends are not the only ones viewing your profile or Facebook or many other popular social networking sites. Creditors and collection agencies are, too.
MSNBC reports that at least two Facebook members have been sent legal notices via their Facebook account. In what appears to [...]

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