Bail Me Out Bennie
Peter Schiff, 03/28/08
Now that the Fed and the Treasury Department have clumsily come to the rescue of the financial titans of Wall Street, it is now politically dangerous to resist similar pleas from just about everybody else. Populism is emerging as a...Read More >>

Bankruptcies in America: Waiting for Armageddon
The Economist, 03/27/08
The recent rise in corporate bankruptcies in America may well be a sign of much worse to come CAPITALISM without bankruptcy, it is said, is like Christianity without hell. With recession looming, the air in America's bankruptcy courts is thick with...Read More >>

Credit Bubble Bulletin, Doug Noland  03/28/08
The bursting of the Wall Street finance and U.S. Credit Bubbles marks an End of an Era. But the start of a deflationary spiral? Importantly, these bursting Bubbles are in the process of consummating the demise of the dollar as...Read More >>

Nationalization
Doug Noland,  03/21/08
It would be an outright crime if thinly-capitalized Fannie and Freddie were allowed to increase their Books of Business by $2 Trillion this year...As far as I’m concerned, much of the U.S. mortgage market was this week essentially...Read More >>

Bailout Nation
Bill Fleckenstein, 03/21/08
How did we get here? How did the United States get itself into the untenable position where homeowners, Wall Street and most financial institutions need -- and more importantly, expect -- help from one government agency or another?...Read More >>

What if The Fed Fails?
David Ignatius, 03/19/08
The Federal Reserve decided last weekend in the inferno of the financial crisis that Wall Street's major players -- even a smallish and brutish one, Bear Stearns -- are too big to fail. So the Fed is pumping all-but-unlimited amounts of...Read More >>

The Fed’s New Tricks Are Creating Disaster
Frank Shostak, 03/19/08
The Federal Reserve is trying a range of new tricks to push new forms of lending as a means of preventing what they fear may otherwise be a major collapse in financial markets. What all these strategies have in common is an...Read More >>

Bearly Alive
Mike Whitney, 03/17/08
On Friday, Bear Stearns blew up. It was the worst possible news at the worst possible time. A day earlier, the politically-connected Carlyle Capital hedge fund defaulted on $16.6 billion of its debt. Carlyle boasted a $21.7 billion portfolio...Read More >>

Mr. Bernanke's Bet
Washington Post Editorial, 03/18/08
Applying his own theories, the Fed chairman bails out Wall Street in the hope of easing the pain on Main Street. BEFORE HE was chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben S. Bernanke was a Princeton economist who studied the...Read More >>

Rescue Me: A Fed Bailout Crosses a Line
Gretchen Morgenson 03/16/08
What are the consequences of a world in which regulators rescue even the financial institutions whose recklessness and greed helped create the titanic credit mess we are in? Will the consequences be an even weaker currency, rampant inflation...Read More >>

What the Price of Gold is Telling Us
Ron Paul, 03/15/08
The financial press, and even the network news shows, have begun reporting the price of gold regularly. For twenty years, between 1980 and 2000, the price of gold was rarely mentioned. There was little interest, and the price was either...Read More >>

“Dollar Crisis Watch:” Wishing for Another Z.1
Doug Noland, 03/14/08
It is neither hyperbole nor fear mongering to warn that scores of players throughout the expansive U.S. financial sector are now in jeopardy of finding themselves engulfed in liquidity crisis…That Tuesday’s Fed announcement did not...Read More >>

Entering the Helicopter Phase
Bill Bonner, 03/14/08
It was the Margin Call from Hell...“Markets in turmoil after a fund fails,” is the headline in today’s International Herald Tribune. The price of gold has breached the important $1,000 level...and hit a new world record. And black gold too–oil– hit $110..Read More >>

The Fed's in a desperate race with spectre of collapse
Damian Reece, 03/12/08
Equity traders, being ever the optimists, decided to look on the bright side of yesterday's central bank intervention. London and New York did a jig after the US Federal Reserve and Bank of England pulled out all the stops to avoid…Read More >>

The Prudent Bailing Out the Reckless
Bill Fleckenstein, 03/11/08
About an hour before today's open [Tuesday, 03/11/08], the Fed penned another chapter in the book it's been writing for some time, wherein the prudent are supposed to bail out the reckless. Now I realize that the Fed was created to provide a…Read More >>

What Kind of Credit Crisis?
A "Reckoning" or a "Crisis?" Bill King, 03/11/08
The word "credit" comes from the Latin for faith or belief. A "credit crisis" is nothing more or less than a widespread loss of confidence in people or institutions whom we were accustomed to considering trustworthy. This is obvious, but it has…Read More >>

The Face-Slap Theory
Paul Krugman 03/10/08
Nobody wants to put taxpayers on the hook for the financial industry’s follies; we can all hope that, in the end, a bailout won’t be necessary. But hope is not a plan. Friday’s employment report--which was so weak that it had many…Read More >>

The John Galt Solution
Caroline Baum, 03/10/08
We want laissez-faire capitalism in good times and a government backstop against losses in bad times. It's a tough way to run an economy. Let's face it: The Federal Reserve must be scared to death as it watches the financial system…Read More >>

Q4 2007 Flow of Funds
Doug Noland, 03/07/08
It is anything but obvious as to how we will now sustain a smooth “recycling” of our massive Current Account Deficits. And I certainly don’t believe it is any coincidence that the recent alarming widening in agency debt and MBS risk premiums…Read More >>

Failed Experiments in Fiscal Stimuli
Dr. Marc Faber, 03/05/08
If a shift from low volatility to high volatility signals a change for the worse in the macroeconomic outlook, then the collapse in the yield of short term US Treasury securities is a symptom of the current credit crisis, which has infected all…Read More >>

There’s a Limit to What the Fed Can Do
Robert Jackson Smith, 03/06/07
The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) has three tools with which to influence the U.S. economy: 1. the discount rate, 2. the money supply, and 3. bank reserve requirements. In recent times, whenever there has been a financial crisis...Read More >>

Countrywide Financial Blindness
Gary North,  03/04/08
Most of the experts in this country were blind in mid-2007 to the subprime crisis, which gets worse each day. With each revelation of multibillion-dollar losses, the financial press refuses to add: "This is just getting started." Now, we are...Read More >>

Bennie and the Monetary Jets
Mark Thornton, 03/03/08
The old monetarist tale of the Great Depression, thoroughly refuted in the Austrian literature, is that the Federal Reserve failed to provide enough inflation (i.e.,money supply) when the market started to weaken and it allowed the money supply..Read More >>

The Federal Reserve's rescue has failed
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 03/03/08
The verdict is in. The Fed's emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral towards a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed. Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63pc...Read More >>