Franklin Roosevelt, despite overtures from Herbert Hoover, famously refused to engage the issues of the Great Depression until after his inauguration. Roosevelt reasoned, politically correctly, that the road to collaboration would brand him sooner than necessary with the incipient disaster. Barack Obama is doing the same but unfortunately he does not live in a simple […]

I jumped the gun this evening. There were two more banks that bit the dust this evening and one isn’t inconsequential. Downey Savings and Loan located in Newport Beach, CA and PFF Bank of Pomona, CA both were taken over. Downey had assets of $12.8 billion and deposits of $9.7 billion. PFF reported assets of […]

Hopefully, sometime this weekend, I will be moving this blog to a WordPress platform. I will try and give everyone lots of warning. I will put up a final post with specific links and directions to the new blog site. It is still going to be called But Then What. If you subscribe via an […]

Here is the latest FDIC seizure. The Community Bank (great name, huh?) of Loganville, Georgia has been taken over. This is a small four branch operation. Reuters has the details. The interesting part of the story is that this is the third Georgia bank to go down this year. That’s a reasonable percentage of the […]

I’m sure you’ve heard the news that Timothy Geithner, the President of the New York Fed, has been tapped to be the next Treasury Secretary. The stock market as is its wont celebrated on the receipt of the news. Why is any one’s guess. If you know as little about the guy as I then […]