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’At home with Ben
We’ve marvelled many times at Jon Hilsenrath’s extraordinary ability to mind meld with the most powerful man in global finance — Ben Bernanke (in case you were wondering).
How else to explain the string of scoops explaining the Fed’s thinking in the lead up to crucial FOMC meetings or get-togethers at Jackson Hole.
Zut alors! – The French bank sell off… (Part deux)
A little earlier we drew attention to this quote from the Wall Street Journal:
“We can no longer borrow dollars. U.S. money-market funds are not lending to us anymore,” a bank executive for BNP Paribas,
Fedwire
You’ve heard of Pestowire and Kleinmanwire.
Well, our US cousins have a similar service. Edited by the Wall Street Journal’s Jon Hilsenrath, it’s called Fedwire and it brings you all the news, views and gossip from the world’s most powerful central bank.
Further reading (for the IBC)
More bedtime reading for the UK’s Independent Banking Commission; this time from research house Autonomous.
The report was referenced in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal as a curtain raiser to the publication on Friday of the IBC’s ‘Issues Paper’.
More mystery in quarterly repo patterns
Readers might remember a WSJ story earlier this year which highlighted intriguing end-of-quarter peculiarities in New York Fed data on primary dealers in repo markets.
The WSJ’s point was that the irregularities could have been the result of banks trying to mask their risk levels in the past five quarters by temporarily lowering their debt,
On those ‘epic’ declines in bank lending
Great headline from the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday: ‘Lending falls at epic pace’.
Of course, with a headline like that, one would expect a less-than-uplifting tale:
U.S. banks posted last year their sharpest decline in lending since 1942,
A global banker tax? (updated with breaking news from France)
Might other countries follow the UK’s lead and hit the bankers where it really hurts?
That certainly is the impression one gets reading the letter penned by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
Goldman Sachs – because we’re worth it
Okay, here it is – 14 pages which explain why Goldmanites deserve all that money.
And basically what it boils down to is this; they are smarter and more profitable than anyone else.
Selected highlights and graphics from Goldman Sachs Compensation Practices.
Goldman’s preferiti
Oh dear. Another week, another negative Goldman Sachs story.
The Wall Street Journal does the honours this time, in the shape of a story by Susanne Craig shedding light on the bank’s more dubious research practices.
727 Cassandras of financial journalism
The Columbia Journalism Review has published a whopping 727-story-strong list of “the best articles” foreshadowing the financial crisis.
The list covers stories written between 2000 and 2007 and published by organisations including the Wall Street Journal,
Very clever, thanks a lot for that photo op
At approximately 1514 BST on Monday Reuters reports:
F16 JET ACCOMPANYING A COMMERCIAL JET TO A NEW YORK AIRPORT – REASON NOT KNOWN
Evacuations galore proceed – banks, bars, commercial buildings etc.