Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Remember the vicious cycle that threatened the entire European banking sector in 2012? It went something like this: over indebted sovereigns depended on domestic banks to buy their debt, but when yields on that debt spiked, the banks took a hit, inhibiting their ability to fund the sovereign, whose yields would then rise some more,…
©Joe Waldron Save money into my pension? I’d rather blow it on a holiday. This is the typical response of a millennial — marketing shorthand for a 20-something — when you ask them about financial planning. More On this story On this topic IN Personal Finance For the generation that grew up in the Noughties,…
The financial crisis turned a lot of Americans into renters, because they couldn’t keep paying their mortgage, or because high unemployment and stagnant wages in the ensuing years forced them to put off home ownership. A new report from real estate website Trulia seeks to identify the groups that lost the most purchase on the…
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/af2f8e0e-d0d6-11e5-831d-09f7778e7377.html#ixzz3ztcpkgur US authorities have now wrung a total of $64bn from banks that sold toxic mortgage securities before the financial crisis, with Morgan Stanley’s agreement…
Among the takeaways from Timothy Geithner’s 2014 memoir “Stress Test” is his contention that the financial system is safer and more stable today. And central to that improvement are the stiffer capital requirements, buffers of liquid assets for financial institutions so they can absorb their own losses. With stronger capital standards, banks must “hold more…
Presidential candidate and professional evader Hillary Clinton has truly perfected the smile-and-turn, a political maneuver often used, but seldom captured on tape. Finally, here we have it: rare footage of Clinton in her natural habitat. In 2013, Politico reported that Clinton had been paid to speak to a group of Goldman Sachs employees, and, according…
“Push button. Get Mortgage.” That’s the tagline of Quicken Loans’ new product, Rocket Mortgage. The company introduced Rocket Mortgage to the massive television audience watching Super Bowl 50 in a one-minute commercial. The ad describes a simple push button app that allows people to get mortgages on their phones, which would lead to a “tidal…
“Hillary Clinton Is Again Put on the Defensive Over Perceived Ties to Wall Street,” the New York Times frets today. Whatever could be going on here? What is the deal, Democratic voters? Dozens of prominent economists and academic experts have endorsed her plans to regulate the financial sector. Her policies would “try to prevent the…
HBO’s 2011 film “Too Big to Fail” is not even the second-best film about the 2008 financial crisis—Adam McKay’s Oscar-nominated “The Big Short” and 2011’s “Margin Call” would probably take those two spots. But “Too Big to Fail” is, like “The Big Short,” an attempt to tell a true story, admittedly with significantly less punchy…
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Having slogged through several years of research on the many and complex causes of the financial crisis, I take it personally when people try to rewrite history and ignore what actually drove the events that led to the collapse. That is our charge today, in response…