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

Category Archive: Credit Crisis

  1. Wall Street Throws A Party But No Customers Show Up

    Imag­ine throw­ing a party for your best cus­tomers and none of them show up. What would you think about your future?

    Well, about a week ago at a Miami Beach asset-backed secu­ri­ties con­fer­ence, Wall Street pro­fes­sion­als invited their best insti­tu­tional bond cus­tomers to a cool South Beach party and almost no one showed up.

    Wall Street is loos­ing its rel­e­vance and becom­ing a dinosaur. Its busi­ness sim­ply can­not exist with­out cus­tomers. Unless it fun­da­men­tally reforms, and quickly, an entire gen­er­a­tion of bankers and finance pro­fes­sion­als will find that they are no longer rel­e­vant. [read full story]

    Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Public Policy, REGULATION, Securitization
  2. SBA Policy Restricts Small Business" rel="bookmark">28-Year-Old SBA Policy Restricts Small Business

    It’s tough to explain why the Small Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion favors banks over non-banks in its flag­ship SBA 7(a) loan pro­gram. For the last 28 years, the SBA has refused to license a sin­gle new non-bank lender and has restricted the abil­ity of exist­ing non-bank 7(a) lenders to finance their port­fo­lios. [read full story]

    Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, SBA, Small Business Lending
  3. Obstacles To Small Business Lending

    On Jan­u­ary 13th I attended the FDIC Small Busi­ness Forum titled Over­com­ing Obsta­cles to Small Busi­ness Lend­ing and got an extra­or­di­nary glimpse into why many small busi­nesses are miss­ing the recov­ery.  Even though the forum pan­elists agreed that “what’s good for small busi­ness is good for Amer­ica”, they had few ideas about how to ener­gize […] [read full story]

    Posted in: BANKS, Bernanke, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Public Policy, REGULATION, Regulatory Reform, SBA, Small Business Lending
  4. It’s Not Too Late For Congress To Fix The Derivatives Market

    The finan­cial reform leg­is­la­tion that passed the House last week doesn’t fix the deriv­a­tives mar­ket but there is still time to make it right. The Sen­ate hasn’t passed its ver­sion of the bill and all Sen­a­tors need to do is include a pro­vi­sion stop­ping the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment from pre­vent­ing enforce­ment of state and local crim­i­nal […] [read full story]

    Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, Credit Default Swaps, economy, Finance, Politics, Public Policy, REGULATION, Regulatory Reform
  5. Why The Government Jobs Policy Isn’t Working

    The U.S. econ­omy is going to be sick until job growth returns and unem­ploy­ment is sig­nif­i­cantly reduced. Pres­i­dent Obama’s eco­nomic team doesn’t seem to know how to stim­u­late jobs growth and what they have tried so far isn’t work­ing very well. While Obama’s pol­icy seems to have stopped jobs from dis­ap­pear­ing, that is very dif­fer­ent […] [read full story]

    Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Politics, Public Policy, Small Business Lending
  6. The Economy’s Shape Is A Mystery That Isn’t Important To Solve

    Today Cather­ine Ram­pell of the New York Times authored a story in the Week in Review that quoted an econ­o­mist who stated there are “as many views of the econ­omy going for­ward as you have let­ters of the alpha­bet to describe the recov­ery”.  I was dis­ap­pointed by the arti­cle because rather than focus­ing on the […] [read full story]

    Posted in: Credit Crisis, Economic Statistics, economy, Finance, New York Times, Public Policy
  7. Hooverism Makes A Comeback In The New York Times

    Last Wednes­day the New York Times Economix Blog pub­lished an arti­cle writ­ten by Casey B. Mul­li­gan sug­gest­ing Pres­i­dent Obama should con­sider let­ting “a bank panic run its course”. While Dr. Mul­li­gan is an Eco­nom­ics Pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago and the New York Times is one of the most respected pub­li­ca­tions in the world, […] [read full story]

    Posted in: Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Hoover Adminstration, New York Times, Public Policy
  8. Bankers Get A Big Surprise: People Without Money Can’t Pay Back Their Debts

    Con­sumer lenders that out­source their credit deci­sions to con­sumer credit rat­ing agen­cies aren’t learn­ing from past mis­takes. By now lenders should have noticed that blind reliance on credit scores doesn’t work. Even so, most lenders con­tinue to dis­re­gard good under­writ­ing fun­da­men­tals and then can’t fig­ure out why they con­tinue to have bad credit per­for­mance. It’s […] [read full story]

    Posted in: BANKS, Credit Crisis, economy, Finance, Politics, Public Policy