The Sunshine Report

Veritas Financial Partners
Information about finance, the economy and business. Entertaining and informative. Seeking Alpha Certified Mark Sunshine Chairman & CEO

Archive: Mar 2009

  1. Regulatory Reform Shouldn’t Rely On The Fed

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    I am still shak­ing my head in amaze­ment at Alan Greenspan’s edi­to­r­ial in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Jour­nal titled The Fed Didn’t Cause the Hous­ing Bub­ble.  In the arti­cle Greenspan explained why the hous­ing bub­ble wasn’t the Fed’s fault (and since he was Chair­man of the Fed, by impli­ca­tion it wasn’t his fault either).  While […] [read full story]

    Posted in: Alan Greenspan, BANKS, Bernanke, Credit Crisis, economy, Federal Reserve, Finance, monetary policy, Politics, Public Policy, Regulatory Reform, Timothy Geithner

  2. Will Monetary Policy Cause Rapid Inflation? Maybe Not Says An Economist At the St. Louis Fed.

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    Con­ven­tional wis­dom sug­gests that a very aggres­sive mon­e­tary pol­icy will cause rapid infla­tion. How­ever, in this month’s Fed­eral Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, William Gavin says that the con­ven­tional wis­dom maybe wrong and that infla­tion isn’t pre­des­tined or even a likely result of cur­rent mon­e­tary pol­icy. Gavin believes that if the econ­omy recov­ers before […] [read full story]

    Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, Deflation, Depression, Economic Statistics, economy, Excess Reserves, Federal Reserve, Finance, Inflation, monetary policy, Public Policy

  3. Mark-To-Market Accounting – The Boogeyman Of The 1930s Is Back

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    I won­der how many peo­ple real­ize that that FDR got rid of mark-to-market account­ing in 1938 after it vir­tu­ally destroyed the bank­ing sec­tor. Accord­ing to Brian Wes­bury and Robert Stein mark-to-market account­ing was the law of the land for most of the Great Depres­sion until it was out­lawed by FDR in 1938. Wes­bury and Stein […] [read full story]

    Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, Depression, economy, FASB, FDR, Finance, Great Depression, Mark to market accounting, Public Policy

  5. Tangible Common Equity – How Much Is Enough?

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    Sud­denly, every­one is inter­ested in the amount of tan­gi­ble com­mon equity (“TCE”) invested in banks. Oddly, no one seems to know how much TCE is enough despite TCE being the pri­mary and most impor­tant ele­ment in deter­min­ing the ade­quacy of bank cap­i­tal­iza­tion. Of course, his­tory pro­vides a guide to what is enough TCE and right […] [read full story]

    Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Obama, Politics, Public Policy, REGULATION, Regulatory Reform, Timothy Geithner, Treasury

  6. AIG’s Mistakes!!!" rel="bookmark">Credit Default Swaps Are Good For Whom? Not Taxpayers Who Are Paying For AIG’s Mistakes!!!

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    After today’s AIG news I am amazed that the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion hasn’t announced an imme­di­ate sus­pen­sion of the sale of new credit default swaps. Per­haps it will take a total melt­down of the finan­cial sys­tem for the gov­ern­ment to finally admit that War­ren Buf­fet was right, credit default swaps are weapons of finan­cial mass destruc­tion. […] [read full story]

    Posted in: AIG, Credit Default Swaps, Economic Statistics, economy, Finance