Archive for the ‘Markets and Regulation’ Category

The Subprime Crisis, Part 3: The Empire Strikes Back.

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

The reaction against futures, once their existence was validated by the Treasury-Federal Reserve Study (see Subprime Crisis, Part 2) in the early 1980's, took a more tactical form. The question became what tribe would dominate the offering of these contracts, and how would their use by the bottle-babies of the ...

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Part 2: The Birth of Derivatives.

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

The single best piece of luck I ever had was to write a couple articles about what was then a gleam in the eye of a couple dozen people in the world, Standard and Poors futures and CPI (Inflation) futures. I learned more about risk and about the human condition in ...

Banking System Reform: Will the Regulators Do it in Four Years, Or Will the Market Do It in Four Days?

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

the-next-selloff.doc   Two events over the past week lead me to believe we should expect a second bank share sell-off following the August disaster, along with a possible second, larger, rescue package from the Federal Reserve. The first event is the visible but completely unsatisfying joint announcement of three large American banks, ...

Mortgage Debt Crisis: The Smoking Gun!

Monday, September 10th, 2007

The thing that has been bugging me most about this crisis is the absurdly heroic stance taken by bank regulators as they scrambled to protect what they now call “the shadow banking system.” Only the Bank of England has appeared cognizant of the impropriety associated with this dip into ...