It’s nice to know that Americans aren’t the only people in the world that believe real estate prices can never stop going up. Apparently the Chinese share our affinity for bubbles. From MarketWatch, real estate prices in China are going through the roof: Beijing’s property prices are climbing at an unsustainable rate, with residential property […]
Archive for July 2nd, 2009
Friday Failures A Day Early
OK, it appears as if the FDIC grim reaper is not going to make it out West this week. So the body count looks to be seven. Here are the links. Founders Bank, Fort Worth, Illinois Millenium State Bank of Texas, Dallas, Texas The First National Bank of Danville, Danville, Illinois The Elizabeth State Bank, Elizabeth, […]
Friday Failures
It’s Thursday but tomorrow is a holiday so the FDIC is busy closing banks today. Six so far. I think that’s a one-week record for this year. I wait until about 7 PDT to post all the closures at once. Banks are still open in the west so there could be more. Check back later […]
FDIC Sets Some High Hurdles For PE Acquisitions Of Banks
I don’t find myself saying this often — Congratulations, Sheila Bair! The new rules that the FDIC proposes for private equity buyers of banks have some teeth. I’ve been blogging overtime on this issue and would prefer to see PE out of the picture entirely but, failing that, I had hoped the FDIC would come […]
Time To Rethink Stimulus?
Today’s job numbers have precipitated the usual response from Washington. Spend more money! Get ready for Stimulus ll. Now all of that might make some sense if we had been spending Stimulus l but so far official estimates put the money out the door at about 10% of what’s been appropriated. That of course leads […]
A Bad News Day On Jobs
Well, we might as well get this out of the way now. The employment numbers were uniformly horrible. Let’s jump into this cesspool. First the numbers. From the DOL, initial claims for unemployment insurance were down 16,000 to 614,000 while the four-week moving average declined 2,750 to 615,250. That, of course, is not the big […]