July 2009

For the second time this year, GE has laid bare GE Capital's books to assuage Wall Street's concerns about the finance unit's stability, and the results are of deep concern. While the company works hard to calm investor nerves at yet another Wall Street meeting, there are a number of danger zones on GE Capital's balance sheet that GE is scrambling to fix. GE has been the worst performer in ... read more

"I think we will probably have to begin raising rates sometime in the not-too-distant future," Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Charles Plosser told Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal in an interview. A renowned inflation hawk at the Federal Reserve is at it again, trying to pull more dovish Fed officials under his wingspan of influence to get them to do more to ... read more

Why did Warren Buffett let Berkshire Hathaway invest in Moody's Investors Service, given the credit rating agency has a damaged balance sheet and has been running a negative net worth, now at a negative $919 mn? It's a baffling question for the Oracle of Omaha, renowned for being in the vanguard of the army of Benjamin Graham value investors. Moody's has reported seven straight quarterly ... read more

President Barack Obama disclosed for the first time at his news conference last night that his administration is weighing a brand new fee for banks that conduct "high risk," "far-out transactions" and pose systemic risk because they are too big to fail. The idea of a new fee is a reformulation of the old Tobin tax on speculative currency trades offered by economist James Tobin about three ... read more

Can the Federal Reserve smoothly dismount out of its unorthodox, experimental policy moves to bring the economy back from the brink, moves that have doubled its balance sheet to $2 tn in a year's time and that have left it vulnerable to potentially $6.8 tn in gross exposures? Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, up for reappointment in January 2010, testified at day two of hearings at a ... read more