Archive for May, 2008
Saturday, May 31st, 2008
Most citizens, we are told, take a cynical view of both Wall Street and Washington. It has given life to the candidacy of Barak Obama, perhaps. Do people of experience with The Street trust Washington to fix the problem? I don’t. I’ll tell you why. We are addressing problems we ...
Posted in Rating Agencies, The Banking Crisis, Bank Management, Polticial Decisions Affecting Banking | No Comments »
Saturday, May 24th, 2008
The rating agencies have an interesting and distinguished history. I first focused on them when working for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. We needed the permission of Standard and Poors Corporation to use their stock index to price our futures contract when it settled. Looking back at S&P’s decision to go ...
Posted in Rating Agencies, Computers Run Amok | No Comments »
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
One of the more self-destructive and fruitless results of the Credit Crisis is the relentless search for scapegoats. This is silly enough when applied to people. (See my earlier blog, “We’ve Found the 12 People that Caused the Crisis! Now We Can Stop Worrying.”) Of course many, many more than ...
Posted in Rating Agencies, Computers Run Amok, The Banking Crisis, Polticial Decisions Affecting Banking | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
It was semi-prophetic the way that the big four Aussie banks announced to the world months ago their robust and healthy capital positions, leaving them well placed to secure the smaller, struggling financials when the sub-prime turmoil ended.
I began to wonder soon after, however, whether this was nothing more ...
Posted in Brad Creighton's View, Australia, Bank Management, Polticial Decisions Affecting Banking | No Comments »