Financial News Blogs
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
(Reuters) The congratulatory e-mails for Carson Block started to arrive on Friday afternoon, within hours of Toronto-listed Chinese forestry company Sino-Forest Corp filing for bankruptcy protection and 10 months after his short-selling research firm, Muddy Waters, accused the company of exaggerating its assets.
International Financing Review
Note: this is an unofficial list of Problem Banks compiled only from public sources. The Unofficial Problem Bank List continued to climb as the FDIC released its actions for February 2011. This week, there were eight additions and five removals, which leaves the list with 985 institutions with assets of $431.1 billion.
Forex - Unofficial Problem Bank list increases to 985 Institutions - March 26 11 8:15 EDT - ForexTV.com
Demand for alternative investments is on the rise, with clients eager to funnel money into real estate, private placements and hedge funds. But with nagging custody issues, plus regulatory warnings, few advisers can meet the growing number of requests.
The Investing News Source for Financial Advisers - InvestmentNews
London Banker
First, hat tip to Barry Ritholtz for the articles linked here. I read two of the articles, written on opposite sides of the planet, one after another, and suddenly the dangers confronting us in political instability were much clearer. Back in June I wrote:
rcarrick@globeandmail.comHere's a surprising suggestion for cost-conscious investors who want to make a break from conventional mutual funds.Try index funds offered by big bank mutual fund families. If you choose well, you'll get returns that are quite close to those much trendier exchange-traded funds.
globeadvisor.com
NT Times - DealBook
Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz had argued that they “knew nothing” of Bernie Madoff’s fraud. Michael W. Peregrine, a partner at the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery, says their settlement with the Madoff trustee may prompt overreaction by officers and directors.
Finance and Business Blog - QFINANCE
In forcing the world's banks to dramatically increase their capital ratios at a time when capital is scarce, are global policymakers and regulators over-reacting to the crisis and reinforcing deflationary tendencies? And with their obsession with promoting new entrants and increased competition in the banking market, are they at risk of sowing the seeds of the next crisis?
The company also practices dirty accounting tricks like "forward funding," "advance funding," and "delayed obligations," deceptive tricks that hide its precipitous finances from auditors and its investors.
DAILYBAIL
“I don’t see anything wrong with asking people to pay the expected value of their health care — a mandate to get insurance to cover the catastrophic things that society would cover in any case — to avoid this type of gaming of the system. Yes, it’s true that many healthy people will pay, remain healthy, and seem to get nothing. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. They have insurance whether they pay for it or not. Society will not let them die of a standard, treatable illness so insurance services are present. In fact, it’s the knowledge that society is providing these services that motivates many people to take a chance and go without.”
The Baseline Scenario
The Myth Of The Resolution Authority « The Baseline Scenario
By Simon Johnson Back when it really mattered – last spring, during the Dodd-Frank financial reform debate – Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware emphasized repeatedly on the Senate floor that the proposed “resolution authority” was an illusion.
ELA is the acronym for Emergency Lending Assistance. This is direct lending by the national central bank, with ECB authorization to local banks with more liberal collateral requirements. The national central bank is responsible/liable for the funds not the euro system. Last week when the ECB announced that four Greek banks were no longer able to borrow from the ECB, this forced them to borrow from the Greek national central bank’s ELA facility. This in turn created confusion and all sorts of imaginary thinking Ray Dalio was featured in Barron’s at the weekend.