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Levy Rivers

Showdown Seen Between Banks and Regulators - Must Sell and Pay Back - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...11bank.html

shared by Levy Rivers on 11 Apr 09 - Snapshot

  • Meanwhile, the Obama administration wants weaker banks to move more quickly to relieve their balance sheets of the toxic assets, the home loans and mortgage bonds that nobody wants to buy right now. But the banks are resisting because they would have to book big losses.

    Finally, there is increasing anxiety in the industry that the administration could use the stress tests of the 19 biggest banks, due to be completed in the next three weeks, to insist on management changes, just as it did with General Motors when officials forced the resignation of its chief executive after examining that company’s books.

  • Levy Rivers
    Levy Rivers on 11 Apr 09
     
    This answers a question I've had - what will make the banks sell those toxic assets at rates suitable for the government to buy - answer - the Stress Test results!!
Levy Rivers

Our Epistemological Depression - The American, A Magazine of Ideas - 0 views

american.com/...our-epistemological-depression

economy crisis bailout

shared by Levy Rivers on 04 Apr 09 - Snapshot
  • These factors have received a good deal of attention. But they are not the whole story, and certainly not the most original part of the predicament. What seems most novel is the role of opacity and pseudo-objectivity. This may be our first epistemologically-driven depression. (Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and limits of knowledge, with how we know what we think we know.)
    • Levy Rivers
      Levy Rivers on 04 Apr 09
       
      The assummbtion is that the interacting functions produced outcomes that was not understandable to those engaged in the operation.
Levy Rivers

Op-Ed Columnist - Showing Some Discipline - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10brooks.html

geithner obama banking

shared by Levy Rivers on 10 Feb 09 - Snapshot
  • Some economists leave the impression that the banking sector is a rotting corpse, hopelessly polluted by valueless toxic assets. Geithner takes a different view. He agrees that many bankers did things that are “reprehensible and deeply troubling.” But the big uncertainty is not inside the banks; it’s in the broader economic climate.
  • Therefore, Geithner argues, the government doesn’t need to go in and nationalize the banks. “It’s very important that we don’t look like there’s any intent of taking over or managing banks. Governments are terrible managers of bad assets. There’s no good history of governments doing that well.”
  • The key, he says, is to create “massive, sustained and substantial macroeconomic policy” that would pump capital into markets to get them working again. The heart of his program is a series of public-private investment funds with names like the Legacy Asset Partnership Bank and the Consumer and Business Lending Initiative. One would acquire toxic assets. One would foster consumer and small-business lending. “There’s a lot of private capital out there that wants to come in. It just can’t get the financing,” Geithner insists. The new programs would encourage private investors, and then once the markets are unfrozen, would “get out as quickly as possible.”
Levy Rivers

Geithner Said to Have Prevailed on the Bailout - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10bailout.html

obama banking rules

shared by Levy Rivers on 10 Feb 09 - Snapshot
  • Finally, while the administration will urge banks to increase their lending, and possibly provide some incentives, it will not dictate to the banks how they should spend the billions of dollars in new government money.
Levy Rivers

An Economy of Faith and Trust - Readers' Comments - NYTimes.com - 0 views

community.nytimes.com/...16brooks.html

brooks comment

shared by Levy Rivers on 19 Jan 09 - Snapshot
  • The Federal Reserve, as a private corporation owned by our banks, creates money and loans it to the government and its member banks (and increasingly everyone else it would seem) at interest. This is not a conspiracy; it is the result of an act of Congress in 1913. At the origin of these loans the principle is created, but the interest required to pay back the loan is not created.
  • You couldn’t print more money than you had gold. Economists would likely argue that this search for the interest to pay the loans is what drives growth.
  • So the irrational behavior that you describe is the only behavior that the system would tolerate as everyone attempted to create more and more wealth to pay the interest and keep the system in balance. One might conclude that the system is irrational and not the people. I would suggest that when the environment is rational and, yes, based on real trust, people are more than happy to behave accordingly. Lurching into the idea that we are all somehow wacky and can’t be trusted is not an acceptable conclusion to draw in the absence of understanding economic construct that got us here in the first place.
Levy Rivers

Op-Ed Columnist - An Economy of Faith and Trust - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...16brooks.html

brooks nytimes

shared by Levy Rivers on 19 Jan 09 - Snapshot
  • In this new body of thought, you get a very different picture of human nature. Reason is not like a rider atop a horse. Instead, each person’s mind contains a panoply of instincts, strategies, intuitions, emotions, memories and habits, which vie for supremacy. An irregular, idiosyncratic and largely unconscious process determines which of these internal players gets to control behavior at any instant. Context — which stimulus triggers which response — matters a lot.

  • A thousand mental shortcomings contributed to the financial meltdown. Republicans have tried to explain it by pointing to irresponsible policies at Fannie Mae. But that only explains a piece of what’s happening.

    This crisis represents a flaw in the classical economic model and its belief in efficient markets. Republicans haven’t begun to grapple with the consequences.

Levy Rivers

Op-Ed Columnist - Stop Being Stupid - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...27herbert.html

resolution

shared by Levy Rivers on 28 Dec 08 - Snapshot
  • The resolution may be difficult, but it’s essential. Americans must resolve to be smarter going forward than we have been for the past several years.
  • The slogan? “Invest in the U.S.” By that I mean we should stop squandering the nation’s wealth on unnecessary warfare overseas and mindless consumption here at home and start making sensible investments in the well-being of the American people and the long-term health of the economy.
  • Madoff summed up his activities with devastating simplicity. He is said to have told the F.B.I. that he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Something for nothing became the order of the day. You want to invade Iraq? Convince yourself that oil revenues out of Baghdad will pay for it. (Meanwhile, carve out another deficit channel in the federal budget.) You want to pump up profits in the financial sector? End the oversight and let the lunatics in the asylum run wild.
  • Plenty of people managed their credit wisely. But much of the country, including many of the top government officials and financial titans who were supposed to be guarding the nation’s wealth, acted as if there would never be a day of reckoning, a day when — inevitably — the soaring markets would crash and the bubbles explode.
  • We were living in a dream world. The general public, and to a great extent the press, closed its eyes to the increasingly complex and baffling machinations of the financial industry, which kept screaming that oversight would ruin everything.
  • Now that the reality of a stunning economic downturn has so roughly intervened, we at least have the option of being smarter going forward.
  • We need to invest in a health care system that improves the quality of American lives, enhances productivity, puts large numbers of additional people to work and eases the competitive burden of U.S. corporations.
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