Checking In With The Bail-ettes On TARP's 1st Birthday

A quick look at how shares of the Bail-ettes have performed over the year since they became partially our property problem… Click Image to Embiggen! Check out the source article for the exact amounts, in case they haven’t already been emblazoned into your brain. Source: Heroes and Zeroes of the Fallout (CNNMoney)

Interview With The Ghost Of Ayn Rand

As regular readers know, I am often visited by ghosts when I work late at my office in the historic Helmsley Building. I recently had an encounter with none other than the ghost of Ayn Rand, the creator of the objectivist philosophical movement and author of Atlas Shrugged, an ideological novel that argued for absolute…

Hot Links: Meet Poe, the World's Tallest Horse

Stuff I’m Reading this Morning… Spanish Banks may be hiding their losses, what this means for world markets. (Bronte) The StockTwits guys teasing the boss. Funny. (HowardLindzon) Sick! Step 1 – add $8 billion in debt to Tribune, Step 2 – steer into bankruptcy, Step 3 – pay bonuses. (DealBook) Red miniskirts, white jackboots and…

Private Sector Cutting Debt…Uncle Sam? Not So Much.

Floyd Norris shows us this morning that while virtually every facet of the private sector in America has been scaling back on debt, the Federal Government has rushed headlong into the breach to fill that void. From the New York Times: Rather than crowding out the private sector, Uncle Sam is now standing in for…

The Incredible Shrinking Finance Sector

This is very cool. The New York Times put up a moving infographic that shows the progression of the 29 largest financial firms and how they first shrank since 2007 and then began to grow again. The graph above shows them from the starting point at the market’s peak in October 2007. The one below…

Hot Links: Bizarro FDIC

Stuff I’m Reading this Morning… Dollar down, stocks and commodities _____? Yeah, yeah, you know the rest. (Bloomberg) Story of the Day: Bizarro FDIC to borrow money from…The Banks! (NYT) This was fascinating: World economies and where we are on the productivity curve. (Clusterstock) Maryland is the most moneymaking state in the US. (CNNMoney) John…

Giving Cramer Credit For His Citigroup Call

I know, I know…Cramer‘s picks underperform the market and Cramer’s hedge fund performance performance was all from IPO’s and Cramer makes out with Lenny Dykstra and blah blah blah. I don’t have time to do a whole Defending Cramer piece right now and I’m not interested in having this post turned into a warzone for…

FDIC IOU's? Not Quite Yet…

If you lost track of what’s happening with the FDIC, one of the few competent bank-related regulatory institutions we have left, they’ve overseen the failure of about 84 banks so far in 2009. The FDIC had a fund to insure these banks’ depositors of about $53 billion a year ago, which had dropped to only…

5 Midget Banks I'm Watching

With the breathtaking run-up in larger banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America, many traders are now looking at the smaller, lower quality names in the banking sector for back-from-the-dead survival plays. Above is a quick comparison I’ve put together of some of the second/ third tier banks, the ones with more regional exposure…

Banks