‘Tis the season and I think it’s way overdue to put in a good word for sunny optimism. It’s been a while since the Golden Turkeys, and I apologize for being offline. This having to work for a living gets in the way of serious bloviating. Here is what is bothering me. The overall tone … Continue Reading
As we look back each November to bestow the year’s crop of Golden Turkeys to the silliest and most annoying instances of regulatory overreach, legislative inanity, governmental misfeasance or the mere idiotic behavior of people without any help from the government apparatchiki, there’s always a glorious excess of candidates. This whole commentary thing would be … Continue Reading
Standing on the beach and gazing at the exotic and unmapped shores of Trumpania (the land remade by the orange swan on November 9th), I am struck by the discontinuity of having watched our government and chattering class looking at our banking sector exclusively through the lens of risk and distrust these past 8 years … Continue Reading
Maybe it’s because I have been in Europe this past week (Munich at Octoberfest actually – Men in way-too-short leather shorts, dirndls, beer steins the size of a politician’s ego, the most astonishing amount of drinking, etc. Good heavens.) I have been wondering: Has anyone been paying attention to what’s happening in Europe lately? You’ve read … Continue Reading
And now to return to our commentary a few weeks back about the stultifying impact of ill-thought through rules and regulations (at best) (Brexit has intervened). This is our Regulatory State which broadly attempted to pick winners and losers and modify market behavior, to get an engineered outcome by using the blunderbuss of proscriptive rules … Continue Reading
On June 6, 2016, the Rapporteur of the European Parliament released a draft legislative resolution to modify EU Risk Retention. The stated goal of this draft is to promote “Simple, Transparent and Standardized” (STS) securitization. Since STS securitization assets must be fully self-liquidating, commercial real estate (CRE) is again left out in this proposal; not including … Continue Reading
You know, there’s never a dull moment when one reports on the regulatory states’ endless and so often fruitless and wrong-headed tinkering with the global economy. So now… let’s talk bail-in. The bail-in regime, which was adopted by all European Union countries (other than Poland) and implemented on January 1, 2016 (European Economic Area (EEA) … Continue Reading
For want of a baker, a job was lost. For want of a job, the economy was lost. For want of an economy, the banking system collapsed. For want of a banking system – well, ultimately Grexit. Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, Grexit, (China), Grexit, Grexit. The Greeks will be fine, right? There is no … Continue Reading
I’ve written about Europe a lot over the past couple of years and not out of just a Schadenfreude enjoyment of watching a slow motion disaster far from our shores but because it seems to me that really matters, both in terms of its impact on the global financial marketplace and the probable knock-on effect … Continue Reading
We here at CrunchedCredit are getting ready, as we do each year at this time, to polish up the palantir and make our predictions and business projections about the coming year. While it can be a fun exercise, it’s actually serious business. To start with, you need a macro view of the geopolitical situation, the … Continue Reading
Who says that Europeans don’t get Halloween? After more than a year in the making, the European Central Bank (“ECB”) just finished its most recent stress test and found that pretty much everything was kinda OK. Sure, a few banks here and there in the nether regions flunked, but perhaps with the exception of that … Continue Reading
Have you heard the following thought expressed recently in one way or the another, “I’m less worried about what new black swans might swim onto our screens and more worried that we will just wake up one day, peer out of our bunker of habituated indifferences to the drumbeat of troubling news and decide, suddenly, … Continue Reading
We at Crunched Credit have taken a bit of a pause of late. It is, of course, the dog days of summer. But it’s time to get back into the fray. Let’s start by noting the doldrums seem to have taken a pass. From where we sit, the markets seem to be in robust health. … Continue Reading
The Financial Times reported on April 2 that the Eurozone Banks continue to load up on sovereign debt; generally, the debt of their respective host countries. A few days later, the Financial Times reported a bevy of talking heads crowing over the end of the EC financial crisis. And then on April 16, the European … Continue Reading
