More economic data – more reasons to be cautious

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 23, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments In February, existing home sales fell 0.6% according to the National Association of Realtors.  This was better than the expected decline of 2.0%.  Additionally, the median price of a home fell 1.8%. Analysis: Home sales are important data to track right now because homes are the biggest purchases that most consumers make.  Those purchases require taking on huge amounts of debt in order to...
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The EU punts Greece to the IMF

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 23, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments I have been closely tracking the debt crisis in Europe for almost two years now.  The financial crisis that beset the United States in 2008, and whose effects continue to this day, was much worse in certain European countries.  Frankly, the full impact of the crisis has yet to be felt in Europe.  The economies of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain are all heavily leveraged with debt and each of...
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Pay czar reviewing pay at bailed out firms

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 23, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments The United States “pay czar,” Kenneth Feinberg, is going to be reviewing the pay and bonuses of 419 firms that received TARP (bailout) monies to see if those funds were paid out properly in the midst of the crisis in 2008.  Included in those firms are AIG, Citigroup, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley.  This review was required under TARP. It will be...
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"Too big to fail" questioned by FDIC chairwoman

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 20, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments At a speech in Orlando, Florida, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Sheila Bair, spoke out against the U.S. implicit policy of “too big to fail.”  This unwritten policy states that certain financial institutions, even if horribly mismanaged, cannot be allowed to fail because of the possible ramifications on the U.S. banking system.  Bair’s...
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Update on TARP costs

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 19, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments The Congressional Budget Office released its most recent estimate of monies allocated under Congress’s 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).  Recall that this is the program that was designed to allocate bailout monies to U.S. businesses intimately tied to the financial meltdown.  The latest estimate of cost to taxpayers is $109 billion.  Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget...
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Are you kidding me SEC?

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 18, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments I was truly shocked to learn last night that the Securities and Exchange Commission recently sided with 12 investment banking firms in a lawsuit designed to eliminate a provision put in place in 2003 to maintain the independence of equity analysts relative to financial firm’s investment bankers. It was widely believed that a gigantic reason why the dot.com bubble happened was because...
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That old blog standard – jobless claims

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 18, 2010 in Blog | 0 comments It’s Thursday…it must be time for the weekly initial jobless claims report.  Et voila. The Department of Labor today reported that initial jobless claims fell by 5,000 last week to a total of 457,000.  Meanwhile, the four-week average also went down by 4,250 to 471,250.  However, jobless claims lasting more than a week increased by 12,000 to a total of 4,579,000. Analysis: Despite...
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