Not an insignificant amount of snark in that analysis paper. Note the instances of "LOL"!

..........second AGAIN.........

.................65 comments on same link........get a life moron......

"New Thread: HSBC Update ( 0 comments ...You could be FIRST! )"

Well that link sure does not work.

It's rotation is tidally locked.

Tidal locking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

test from crbot channel

I remember when Washington state prohibited interest greater than 12% on credit cards, yet the banks offered credit cards in WA.

I think you should trade on that theory.

fried,

That is the consolation prize, a bailout package well in excess of $200 billion euro was shopped around but rejected by Germany...and not all of the 24.5 billion is new money IIRC...

I guess it's too early to ask which, if any, banks might survive this debacle.
Any survivors will be competing against government-funded entities for the foreseeable future, so it's not clear that there exists a viable business model for a privately-held bank for now, at least at any large scale.

Which leads me to wonder if there is a business model for small start-up banks that cater to local needs like small business and specialized mortgage loans. For example, pay-option or alternate-doc loans are probably unavailable at any large bank by now. But there was always a small market where pay-option loans actually made sense, as well as a similar market for alt-doc, in cases where potential customers have variable income or non-traditional employment - think small business owners.

I guess that other than a hard-money lending approach, there's probably no capital available for such a bank.

On a related lending issue, has anyone looked at the notes that Advanta is offering over here? No FDIC insurance. I wonder if Advanta will be good for the money?

mp, you made it. I was wondering if the new system had given you trouble, hadn't seen you post lately.

It takes a little getting used to but CR has been tweaking it and it's getting easier to use with the adjustments he made. Regards to you and yours.

Extend the pre-Reagan trend on this Long Term trend out to the present, you may see that we are headed for 400-600.

No doubt a policy of Guns and Butter (LBJ), followed by a national currency default (Nixon), and then capitulation and defeatism (Carter) is the correct way to proceed. If we do so, S&P 400 is in the bag.

We already have the Gunz and Butter budget proposal on the table.

Capitalism in a fiat currency based and consumer driven world cannot operate under the old rules. You cannot kill your host.

Don't blame the J-people again!

just took a quick look at the futures, ouch.

futures not trading right now - it must be in her imaginatio

2.5 hours to go for commodities ....?!?

The furor over Janet Jackson's nipple had nothing to do with nudity.

It was about whether or not you can do outside-the-box things at halftime of the Super Bowl

You can't.

The EBRD + EIB + WB bailout is a patchwork immediate response. They have been forced to act in the last couple weeks, and they don't yet have unity to act.

The suggestions that an unnamed benefactor will fund the IMF for their benefit is hysterical.

BIS is the best source on international flows that I know of, and you might be very interested to read the Feb 3 report Capital flows and emerging market economies — Capital flows and emerging market economies

They approach Emerging Europe as East Asia 1997, but worse

Unlike the last round of T-bonds, I'm no longer sanguine. Expecting outright debt monetization to keep yields down. No trade, no surplus, no funding. Because of the supply chain efficiencies enabled by stable monetary conditions, there is less slack and contingencies distributed throughout the system. This is why the adjustments have been rapid and huge. We are entering the 60-90 day period of post new year delinquency, just about the last major buffer in the system. Under the present sunny day economy, car companies are still expecting just about a full recovery in auto sales in under 2 years and who knows what consumer electronics companies are thinking or anybody else. As there are fewer ways to hide the losses on balance sheet (forcing inventory on to distributors, understating loan loss expectations, ...) going into summer, we will see another magnitude of layoffs. It would not surprise me to see the Fed's balance sheet double another time to $4 trillion by Fall 09

only the one line of Asia '97 is a summary, I haven't read the report properly yet because I only skimmed it a few times when it came out for a few things.

Hungary is definitely a keystone country, if they fall the Western European banks are done. Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland are all set for an Irish path with an empty pocketed IMF. Denmark has a similar foreign lending to GDP exposure, but they have a much better fiscal position so more like Sweden. Britain is done for once the crisis flows back to them through Asia. Spain is waiting for the same phone call from Latin America (although that position is much preferable than being exposed to Eastern Europe)

One thing that would help is if Switzerland/the Swiss Franc were crashed and devalued before an emerging Europe bailout were done. Both in terms of financial cost and political hegemony, but I'm sure such malevolent thoughts are not entertained

Yep. No more, no less.
Cheers

C

I find this interesting, mostly for personal reasons.

2 months ago, without any warning at all, I checked my HSBC credit card balance to find that the 'available amount for cash withdrawl' had decreased by 75% overnight

I called and emailed to find out why, as Ive never been late, and often carried a balance for a few months out of the year that would eventually be paid off with the interest it generated(read profit). Eventually, the only response I was able to get back was that 'we have taken these actions based on internal business decisions'. In other words, BullShit.

Ive never used a 'cash withdrawl' from a credit card, mostly because I know its a GIANT rip-off, but Im still irritated that my personal financial situation is being limited because of the decisions of some pinhead board member. Im patiently waiting for the total credit limit itself to be reduced as well. Which again, doesnt bother me on any other level than on principle.

So they get the credit from the govt, by taking it away from their customers, how quaint...

Seriously, tell me again why this system is worth 'saving'?

/rant off

$17 Billion sounds like a lot I guess, but I don't understand why we never hear about the $57 BILLION HBC took on the books during the super SIV days (remember those?)....Seems HBC is far from done here....

Maximus
4best4worst’s Blog
New 4 best 4 worst posted today--finding the truth out there...

And it has a bit of a historic precedence.

I have a credit card from Orchard Bank/HSBC. I got it when I moved to the US, and only Capital One and them were willing to extend me any credit. My limit on this $300 and $500 on the Capital One card. I would cancel the card but they are the bulk of my credit history - only got approved for a WaMu one a year ago.

They must love me as a customer - used it maybe 5 times in total, have a high credit score now and pay them an annual fee.

fried says:
The banking sectors in Central and Eastern Europe are to get a 24.5bn euro ($31bn; £21.8bn) rescue package to support them in the economic crisis.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the World Bank have pledged the investment.

And the international "institutions" troop out to take the field. This should be fun for about a minute. Watch as institutions specifically designed to not do their job try to actually perform in the midst of a historic crisis. Wonder how much real money is behind those "pledges". Seems to me like there's not too many raises left in some people's bank rolls.

So all that German lending to Hungary, whose fault is that?

Hypo, Commerzbank, Deutschebank, Allianz who was in charge of regulating them?

All those additional exports to Emerging Europe that boosted Germany's deficit to only the low single digits, whose fault is that?

etc, etc

The fact that Hungary's proposed ~200bn aid package was rejected is bad news for Germany

Comrade Byzantine_Ruins says: Today, 13:27:35
And the international "institutions" troop out to take the field. This should be fun for about a minute. Watch as institutions specifically designed to not do their job try to actually perform in the midst of a historic crisis. Wonder how much real money is behind those "pledges". Seems to me like there's not too many raises left in some people's bank rolls.

End of the IMF?

This has been going on for some time now. They canceled my Mom's Discover the same "reason" last fall.

wrt CC's cancelling unused accounts, can you blame them? They are trying to lower their costs, and surely mailing monthly invoices is one of them. Credit is a privilege, not a right. Use it or lose it.

And if you aren't using it - why have it at all? They are doing those cardholders a favor really.

I would recommend "Mis(behaving) markets" & "Chaos a new science". Those two books give a clear picture and answer the question "WHY" the systematic failure occurs.
p.s. those books were around for a while and those ideas even longer. However they were avoided cause most of the academics have a reputation to guard and wouldn't want to associate themselves with "heretics".

No problem Jas, i got it. Ok, thanks for the reply. I like his form (Hudson), hard hitting take no prisoners. I was intrigued by the fact that he uttered the number 470 trillion (i think it was) for the toxic's size, all bets in. Of course its a guesstimate, but never the less. Its beyond imagining anyway.

Just JasFest March 09

Comrade Terry says: Today, 14:07:19
“"American International Group Inc's board approved the latest overhaul of a U.S. government rescue on Sunday"

We expected them to reject it?

"No, Mr. Bond[s]. We expect you to die." Perhaps the board was having second thoughts about the terms for fear that the US taxpayer would balk when presented for their approval.

"Beware the Kalends of March,"

When the Romans said: It will happen on the Kalends of the Greeks, they meant 'never.

Applause! Applause!!!

Saw that, but didn't know about Cargill's exposure. They are the second largest private company in the US behind Koch Industries (of the take $230mn and give $25mn back with no charges fame)

We heard you the first dozen times. Sheesh!

Thus begins an era of global food shortage and hoarding. We are experiencing worldwide droughts at the same time that prices are so low that farmers have little incentive to plant, and credit is so scarce that they can't buy seed and fertilizer. As bad as the world economy is, world population keeps increasing and all of the world's billions of people who have learned to eat meat aren't going to forget the taste or desire. If you are a despot or political party that wants to keep the people from revolting, make sure they have food.

We are less than 12 months away from a world food crisis.

Not if they have the cash to pay for food.

It will be the poor without subsidies who will starve.

Anybody know what the total losses admitted to so
far add up to?

I don't think the losses are an illusion; the pain will
be very real. Actually, I was asking a very simple-minded question, to wit:

How much has been confessed to so far.

Months and months ago, there were periodic totals, but none
recently. It has gotten so big no one wants to say?

The physical assets will stay there, but like houses,
they must be used, or rot. Likewise the abilities to run
things must be used or rot. I rather think the assumption
that getting an MBA actually prepared you for something
was never accurate. I kept mumbling about a Mandarin society
being not a good idea. And it wasn't. And yet a friend of my son is still going for an MBA. I asked him why. Why not
study science or nursing or accounting or name something
that prepares you for some sort of productive work. He
had no answer and I gather no sense that the world is
changing. His profs won't be telling him; they want to keep their jobs too.

This is a red herring. The debt does not have to be paid off in a year, but more likely over decades, dropping the annual "dues" from $36K by a factor of 10 at least.

That is a good question. An even better one is: What are the total losses? What will a bailout cost? That knowledge presumes that the location of the dead bodies is known. I don't know if regulators can look at the banks' books and discover the truth, but they ought to be able to. As of now, I am of the opinion that CDSs are being held over our heads by the banksters to provoke fear. I think that CDSs are bogey men, like terrorists and communists were. Keep the people afraid.

I rarely use my Amex card, and have been disappointed that I wasn't chosen to get $300 to close the account. Instead, I got an offer for a Platinum card at $450/yr "membership dues." No thanks, dreamers.

Liz
if you click on the link, it's a 12 bed, 12 bath place, with pool and tennis court, all going to ruin. Was designed for the prince, but looks like a corporate conference center to me. Pictures in the link are great...story made me think of you.

Is he still on drugs? That is symptomatic, I think, of our recent culture of BS, make believe, say-it-and-it-must-be-true culture.

Hard to find hotels within miles of Augusta, Georgia. Evidently the Masters tournament will be well-attended in April. Nothing available at the Willcox in Aiken. Roadside inns charging $400 a night.

Why 'rouge' instead of 'rogue'?

More on Jas Jain...

"Jain, since the beginning of his blogging, has needled fellow armchair economyths to be more honest about their limitations. He also has goaded commenters to marry their theories to what's happening in their real-world Dopedom and to stop relying on "born and bred dopes" that ignore inconvenient facts."

"Jas Jain, "Let's Take the Dope Out of Born and Bred Dopes," Americans Are All Dopes Review (every issue): every page."

But Jain has NOT taken DOPE out of his Born and Bred Dopes! E.g.,

Dec 7, 2006: "The good news is Americans are born and bred dopes."

August 2007: "The historical record strongly suggests that in 2003 and 2004, Americans were born and bred dopes."

AUGUST 22, 2008: "Considering all the doom and gloom out there, adulation is being heaped on born and bred dopes."

Feckless

PS: Jas, a political propagandist, contributed nothing to this thread.

What is you quote source, badboy? By the way, how do the 'bots working VWAP make money? Inquiring minds want to know.

traderwalt-is there a free website to pick up this futures data?

I sorta wish there would be a market limits day
to start forming a bottom. This long grind of
80-100 points off is depressing without even giving
you that rollercoaster feeling. Why not one 800-1000
points off day.

You know that house is really a big big lower middle class McMansion. For that much money, I'd expect a glorious stone
pile a la Bleinheim palace or something. With mosaics on the
floors and fresco-ed walls. I guess it's the
acreage. Maybe the bazillionare regards it as a tear-down.
And now it is.

Well, most of the Bay Area's housing is decades old stock that really deserves nothing better than to be torn down, so it's convoluted karmic justice.

I don't know, KR. With other components contracting, consumption could well retain that percentage.

Yes, that was the first thing that occurred to me also, but does that make sense to you? especially given CR's Feb graphics of yesterday? I have a hard time reconciling the two realities.

Sometimes it's years. After a couple of years and the
furniture is used, well, why not walk away?

After hurrican Andrew, I had a (small) house full of furniture to replace. I found well made furniture, with not much in
the way of thin verneers hard to find. Our antiques of
solid wood survived. The stuff we bought, even if we paid a fairly large amount for it did not. I was willing to pay for
good stuff, to last a lifetime, since the insurance company was then generous. (Thanks Pru). Holding up fine so far. People don't know what quality is.

Rob Dawg says:
End of the IMF?

Who can tell. Certainly the end of their global relevance for a while. Who can tell if they'll become the guise or conduit for some future cash flow and be reborn. Certainly a lot of global development "institutions" are due to pass away momentarily. Their end was already nigh with the demise of post-imperialism and the rise of the vendor financing international trade regime -- the world had gotten too disparate to have a concentrated need for their brand of national debt slavery. I certainly would not cry to see them go, but their ultimate fate depends on how useful a vehicle they are.

Guest replies:
“Actually the beginning of the IMF

Come on dude, I don't want to be disrespectful but think this through. Who is gonna fund this? People who don't have a pot to piss in themselves? Like I said to Rob Dawg above, these institutions may survive by morphing into something necessary to some emergent faction's agenda. If you think these guys are gonna ride to save the day as part of some part of global institutional heroes, wow are you about to get a disillusioning lesson in the nature of how global institutions work, or rather, don't work. These institutions never made anyone's life better if they weren't a banker or a despot, I would not get my hopes up too high that the leopard will change its spots.

Looks like there is no center to hold. S&P 500 futures off almost 1%. This price area is so far off in the past that buyers/sellers at this price point must have bailed long ago, like in the 90s. We are doomed, surely doomed.

testing this crappy commenting system to see whether it reorders comments in flat mode when replying to someone up thread

Nothing is up. Someone probably picked off your card in the mail or your wife threw it away thinking it was junk mail. Has happened to me several times. Citi wants your business - believe me...

By. Halo works from I shmpne. Rofl

Mein Gott! Dow futures below 7K at 6987! Where is the bottom?

Bloomberg futures has dow currently sporting a six handle.

Tomorrow, during regular trading hours, if the DOW is below 7K, we are seeing the blow-back of all time. 70s, 80s, here we come. But for those of us who remember, it may have been a better time.

Well, the boys are going back on tour in April/May..

California, Preaching on the burning shore..

k, maybe we can get someone to automatically harvest comments and throw them into a simpler format for cellphone users?

So who is betting that Mr. Dow will indeed trade below 7K tomorrow?

Apparently a lot of people since the futures are below that now.

"End of the IMF? "

Not at all. On the contrary. Ask Ukraine.

"Consumption still 71% of GDP' (Steven S. Roach is the Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia). Something is out whack with that statistic."

Roach predicted our present travail some years ago. Do you remember?

Seems like there are a lot less comments with this new system, or maybe I am imagining it?

Roach predicted our present travail some years ago. Do you remember?

I certainly do, starting with his 2003(?) warning to the Fed to raise FFR 2 basis points immediately or suffer the consequences of future bubbles.

This is the Apollo 13 of financial crises. We are going to down-mode. Instead of landing on the moon we will be satisfied with a safe splash-down.

What is the private message feature linked to the avatar? Is it a private message to the person represented by the avatar?

Yes, that would seem to be the case.

i mostly agree, EU banks are facing double jeopardy. Their solution is to barry a head in the send & sand castles are always fun.

When you bury your head in the sand, best beware roving Cornholios

cd

Dollar:

INO Equities Stocks Indexes - U.S $ INDEX (NYBOT:DX) Price Chart and Quote

Obama CRUSHING what little remained of the shambles on Wall St - The health care and military industrial complex. Total collapse is now in force.

Obama=CRASH

Dow is overpriced, relative to the S&P. Expect selling in the Dow.

Yeah, I heard on NPR that the army is having no
trouble recruiting these days.

Damn, this thing is going as slow as Haloscan of yore.

Beware the Kalends of March, the Nones of March, and the Ides of March. Beware every single day of March

peace, I'm out

I find this hard to believe. I live and work in the heart of Silicon Valley. The few who I know indirectly who have been laid off have found other positions relatively quickly (within weeks or months). There are more active venture capital funded companies (6,000) here today than there were at the peak of the dotcom boom.

Real estate in core neighborhoods around Silicon Valley and the better residential neighborhoods in San Francisco is still selling at discounts of only 10% off the peak, though the mix has changed alot with low end, poorly maintained places being sold in large numbers (since no more price appreciation is in sight), skewing the median down.

My metric for when tech layoffs are serious is when I see home prices back to what they were in the mid-1990s, with price-to-income in the 4-5 range, down from a peak of 8-9.

But wait! State economic development agencies are starting to get into the confessional act, as detailed in this story about a county development authority that needs a bailout:

State May Bail Out Highlands - News, Sports, Jobs - The Intelligencer / Wheeling News-Register

"someone told me that 35% of all the recent layoffs in CA were in tech. Anyone else see this?"

finance, back office, tech support - YEAH as of the rest of tech, haven't heard anything about those; I think tech is holding pretty well, their productivity gains in the last 8 years contrary to the rest of the sectors were HUGE.

energyecon and others,
re the proposed Eastern European bailout..my post.was to answer Werner's gloating that only Americans needed bailouts...that Europeans were immune to such measures...

oh, and since it is bound to come up, the 1.somesuch trillion of loans to Eastern Europe? Those are the direct cross border loans, 80% of the EE's banking system are subsidiaries to the Western Banks and so the exposures are internal and not included

The issue is that those subsidiary banks have had their capital recalled in order to lend in their mother countries as necessary to get a bailout from the mother government

So depleted capital + increasing losses = hell tomorrow's problem aren't you a wee bit early?

The 480bn is just a third of the direct loans from the mother banks. As much foreign money was lent to Eastern Europe as Asia, but unlike Asia EE is less productive, has lower savings rates, and priced the currency risk too low in the ultimate belief everyone would join the Euro come hell or high water. If they are neglected, then Western Europe gets screwed on their imports and they have to face the same problem.

Losses must be allocated, and stubbornly or uncooperatively are the 2 most expensive ways possible

Rumour mill The right of eminent domain has been give to China if we default on our debt by said Secretary of State. Prvi interaktivni multimedijski portal, MMC RTV Slovenija

I'm soo on message with this. I work with a bunch of arrogant euros who blather on endlessly about the New Multilateralism ...

It's just not working.

C