Latest on twitter:
"China’s banking regulator issued a stern warning to banks to strictly comply with capital requirements or face sanctions, the clearest sign yet Beijing is worried about possible risks building in the country’s financial system after a year of blow-out lending."
Denis McMahon in China’s banking regulator talks tough about complying with capital-adequacy rules - WSJ.com (via quotingthecrisis)
"Ultimately, Chinese growth is the result of a great skyhook: an artificially cheap currency. That skyhook says: Chinese prosperity is in many ways simply an economic fiction. That currency manipulation can’t last forever — and without it, China will have to confront the same problems every industrialized society does: the tremendous costs of a model of growth that places “product” over people."
What’s Your Strategy for the Next Decade? - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org
"A new decade’s breaking, and in it, people, companies, and countries will have to strategize differently. The story the macroeconomic tea leaves foretell isn’t one of power shifting from America to China or anywhere else. It is a story of global economic might everywhere wavering and falling, unable to meet the new challenges of the 21st Century, The Age of Decline isn’t just American: it’s global, a descent into a new kind of economic dark age - unless different choices are made."
What’s Your Strategy for the Next Decade? - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org
Lots of people make a living saying that the sky is falling. Umair is the only one I take seriously.
"Debt didn’t get dangerously out of scale because the system was broken. It got out of scale, in part, because the system worked."
I switched majors from history to finance once I figured out which one of those two fields drove the other.
The biggest thing we’re doomed to repeat is failed monetary policy. That’s been true from the Romans to the Russians.
In a time of renewed scrutiny for the banking sector, many are fighting against the tide. For consumers, managing their finances has never been so difficult - which could be why the use of prepaid debit cards is on the rise.
"We all know at this point that our banking system is being used as an unregulated bonus-seeking mechanism for bankers, now underwritten by taxpayers with $23.7 trillion worth of national wealth. Bankers lent pretend money to home buyers to award themselves actual money in bonuses — making home prices balloon and, in the process, bankrupting America’s treasury, currency, the states, and many of its citizens. To simply let the housing market rapidly correct itself (or more likely over-correct) would result in massive societal disruption, possible violence and unnecessary suffering."
Dylan Ratigan | Veterans Get Lip Service, Bankers Get Billions & We Get Foreclosures (via poortaste)
"…42% of American men with fathers in the bottom income quintile remain there as compared to: Denmark, 25%; Sweden, 26%; Finland, 28%; Norway, 28%; and the United Kingdom, 30%."
Inequality Begets Inequality (via azspot)
The American Dream may be just that
Editorial - Ongoing Agony of the Banks - NYTimes.com
It is hardly surprising that GMAC is circling back to the government for a third helping of taxpayer money. GMAC is struggling under the double whammy of bad car loans and the fallout from its misguided foray into mortgage finance at the height of the housing bubble. After the government applied stress tests to the banks last May, it was the only big bank that could not raise the capital it was deemed to need.
