CERF Blog

I had to pause when I read George Melloan’s Wall Street Journal piece today. Seems he sees a conspiracy between Treasury and the Federal Reserve to fund the national deficit with bank funds to the detriment of business and economic growth. In Melloan’s world, the co-conspirators do this by regulation, giving banks little choice but… Read more

This recession and its accompanying financial crises started with large financial institutions making headlines with bad loans, liquidity problems, and in many cases insolvency. The driving factors at that point were the toxic residential-real-estate-based securities filtering their way through the financial system. Many large financial institutions were highly exposed to securitized packages of residential mortgages… Read more

I tweeted the title of this blog entry the other day and got a bit of pushback. My tweet was in response to this Yahoo! article. It seems that bank regulators want to control bank executives’ salaries as part of a plan to reduce risk taking at banks. Of course, the problem is that the… Read more

Today’s news will be dominated by the BLS’s unemployment data release. I’m sure we’ll have more to say on that. Right now, I’d like to discuss a less-publicized data release, one that probably has more information than the unemployment data. Yesterday, the FDIC released bank charge-off data, and it was disappointing and scary. I’ve posted… Read more