by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Last Time Corporate America Did This, The Stock Market Crashed
So what happens when these huge and reckless buyers with their nearly endless resources start cutting back after a phenomenal peak? Well, we know what happened in 2008.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on This Debt Is Explosive, And it Sits on the Shelf Everywhere, Waiting to go off
I was interviewed by Jorge Nascimento Rodrigues for “Janela na web” (a Portuguese site) and the printed edition of Expresso. After what I said, he might never interview me again :-]
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Public Pension Plans: Boom and Bubble Forever Or Bust
State and city pension plans have been in a heap of trouble for years. What they need in order to be there in the future is a booming economy year after year and endlessly inflating asset bubbles. Otherwise, forget it. And even then, there’s a $1.1 trillion hole.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Fed’s Bullard: ‘The Bubble Was Developing Under Our Noses’
Wiping out in one fell swoop six years of carefully orchestrated propaganda, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard admitted the Fed had dropped the ball during the prior bubble that blew up the financial system, and that it’s dropping the ball again during the current bubble.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on QE, Bailouts, And Families Struggling to Buy Food
It was a very basic question: Have there been times when you did not have enough money to buy the food you or your family needed? In wealthy countries, the percentages should be small, and given all the money-printing, it should be zero, you’d think.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on This Chart Is The Fate of Housing In America As Student Loans Bankrupt A Whole Generation
The equation might not have gone so horribly awry if each class of graduates had seen their incomes skyrocket in line with their student debt. But that’s a crummy joke in America.
by David Stockman • • Comments Off on The Hazardous Hunt For Carry – Why The EM Rebound Isn’t Real
The monetary plumbers keep banging money market rates to zero, thereby ignoring what the money market rate really is in a financialized, debt-ridden system: the price of hot money, the single most important price in all of capitalism.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on The Brutal, Beneath-the-Surface, Slo-Mo Crash of Stocks
Even while the googly-eyed mainstream media celebrate the Dow’s record high, beneath the gloss, thousands of stocks are getting gutted. And the carnage is spreading.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Explosive Hidden Leverage Threatens To Blow Up the Markets
We don’t know what hedge fund manager Steven Cohen will do with the money he borrowed from Goldman Sachs. We don’t even know how much it is, though it’s a lot; the personal loan is backed by his $1 billion art collection. But we know how he’ll use it: cheap leverage.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Banks And Hedge Funds Make Curious Deal On New Structured Toxic-Waste Securities
New regulations force banks to get rid of CLOs. They’re similar to subprime-mortgage-backed CDOs that blew up in 2008. But CLOs are backed by junk corporate loans, including malodorous “leveraged loans.” And they’re booming again. So the banks made a deal.
