Michael Lewis’ compelling expose of the runaway Wall Street machine that caused the credit crunch is both horrifying and fascinating.
credit-crunch
Mervyn King blames globalisation for the credit crisis, but that hardly gets him or us off the hook.
Bankers don’t deserve their multi-million bonuses in the best years, let alone when they’re on life support. Bash those bonuses.
The banks are both too big to fail and too profitable to be allowed to continue in their current state.
A rant about overpaid bankers, plus my usual weekly money and investing blog and newspaper links.
The only thing worse than losing money in the investing game is thinking about profitable opportunities you missed out on. (Yes, investing is pretty much a recipe for misery. Seriously, go invest in a tracker instead). Anyone brave enough to buy certain UK bank shares a few weeks ago would by now have made a [...]
A few months ago, nobody but a few U.S. Federal Reserve groupies had ever heard of quantitative easing. Yet today we’re told it’s the only thing that can save the financial system from meltdown. Indeed, the U.S. authorities have been moving towards quantitative easing for months, while the Bank of England has just got a [...]
I was going to post this yesterday, but creator Jonathan Jarvis’ website was down, presumably under the load of thousands of Wall Street bankers (or their secretaries) desperately clicking to learn where they went so wrong: .
Source: Digital Look I don’t know what annoys me more: That Barclays Bank shares rose 72% on Monday while I was still finishing off a post suggesting they might be worth a punt, or that I didn’t buy any myself. Oh ‘greedy’ side of the fear-greed investing equation, how we’ve missed you. I use the [...]
The ever fantastic economics blog The Big Picture has reprinted an interesting letter from John Mauldin, the best-selling US investment writer, in which he details the odd things going on in the markets. Like most private investors I can’t pretend to understand all of it, but it does reinforce that these times really are as [...]
(Image by: magnus) What has the UK government got against young people? Why is it obsessed with pulling up the drawbridge to anyone who’d like to buy a home but who can’t afford (or won’t pay) credit bubble prices? I will declare my interest: I rent, having decided several years ago that housing was too [...]
Written in 1989, Liar’s Poker remains one of the best route maps around Wall Street’s corridors of ‘high’ finance: that is, the skullduggery that brought us the credit crunch and destroyed itself in the process. Now Liar’s Poker author, Michael Lewis, has written on The End of Wall Street’s Boom in Portfolio magazine, and as [...]
Subprime silliness, nailed by two comedians back in 2007. (As opposed to being explained by the comedians who came up with sub-prime and were still defending it back then.) For non-UK readers, the chaps in the video are the always excellent Fortune and Bird, who often speak more the truth in their rambling obfuscations. MBEs [...]
So about two years ago I got talking to a friend’s mother who had inherited Barclays shares, because I am the sort of nerdy person who talks about shares at dinner parties. She had no thoughts on the bank’s future. She simply owned a bit of it. I suggested to my friend that she might [...]
Tax, schmax. Nobody likes paying taxes: from the richest to the poorest, we all think we’re getting a poor return, even if we believe in theory, as me and Warren Buffet do, that taxes are a necessary evil for the good of society. Given that I’d rather write a dinner invitation to my mistress’s mother-in-law [...]
Remember when Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, was all about applying ‘Moral Hazard’ to the banking system? You know, the idea that some banks had to fail to teach others not to make dodgy lending decisions? You can be sure King remembers making statements on risky lending like this: “The provision of [...]
More evidence that house prices are really falling comes from the Nationwide building society, in its latest official house price index. While it tries to draw attention more to annual figures in the accompanying commentary, which are still very much up, the quarterly figures for January to March 2008 are dreadful. House prices haven’t fallen [...]
Stock markets have been falling for months, led by a collapse in confidence in the financial system and plunging bank stocks. In the UK we’ve seen Northern Rock crumble, while in the US the investment bank Bear Stearns lived up to its name after jitters led to rumours which led to a run on its [...]
A quick update to my post of last week discussing Zopa rates rising because of the credit crisis. Rates have now come down – my main lending offer to A* customers is now out of the ‘Zone of Possible Agreement’ (ZOPA), which in English means people can get such better rates from other Zopa lenders [...]
So you’ve done your four financial crisis checks: Your savings are safe They’re earning more interest You’ve got a plan to pay off any debt Your mortgage is sorted for the foreseeable future. Time to turn over and fall back to sleep? Possibly. I’m serious! It’s often too late to Do Something once a financial [...]
We can’t wish away the credit crisis. However sensible you or I have been with our investments, borrowing and spending, we can’t wind back the clock and stop bankers throwing money at poor people who’ll never be able to pay it back, and who are often now paying a far higher price – repossession, dislocation, [...]
Am I the only investor sick of hearing financial industry insiders bleating that the US Federal Reserve must do more to ease their pain? Am I the only stock market investor who would like to see the world’s major indices fall hard to purge and punish the companies – and policies – that set the [...]
Last night Alastair Darling, the UK Chancellor, guaranteed 100% of savings in Northern Rock – and indeed the Financial Services Authority has since gone further, stating this guarantee extends to other troubled financial institutions that might emerge in coming days. Given the scenes we’ve witnessed since Thursday’s news that Northern Rock required a lifeline from [...]
As I write, people are queuing outside a major British lender, Northern Rock, to take all their money out. Only in Britain would a run on a bank see customers forming an orderly line from the back. Reading comments in the press, it’s clearly something that many people never expected to see in their lifetimes. [...]