OMG Is Bono ok??
OMG Is Bono ok??
BELGIUM’s Fortis is this weekend poised to become the first large continental bank to fall victim to the credit crunch, as the global chaos continues with Bradford & Bingley and American savings giant Wachovia both teetering on the brink.
The Belgian central bank and the country’s regulator are paving the way for a bailout of the huge banking and insurance group, which has a £540 billion balance sheet and a market value of £12 billion.
In Britain, the fate of Bradford & Bingley will be decided today. Fren-etic talks between the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the government have been taking place this weekend to save the troubled mortgage bank.
I'm really interested in how things will shake down in the UK as time goes on.
Troubled bank Bradford & Bingley is to be nationalised, the BBC has learned.
...
The bank will be nationalised using special legislation the Treasury put through when it took Northern Rock into public ownership earlier this year.
The measure is expected be announced on Sunday night or Monday morning.
I'll let you know how it goes. Remember, as long as someone says something, it's true.
No surprise there.
no. i imagine financeguy will have an opinion on this, and i really want to hear it... but the analysts that ive head on this side of the pond say is that the euro will do even better by comparison.
What do you think about the predictions that UBS is the next big one?
The crucial problem on this side of the Atlantic is that the largest European banks have become not only too big to fail, but also too big to be saved. For example, the total liabilities of Deutsche Bank (leverage ratio over 50!) amount to about €2,000bn (more than Fannie Mae) or more than 80 per cent of the gross domestic product of Germany. This is simply too much for the Bundesbank or even the German state, given that the German budget is bound by the rules of the European Union’s stability pact and the German government cannot order (unlike the US Treasury) its central bank to issue more currency. Similarly, the total liabilities of Barclays of around £1,300bn (leverage ratio 60!) are roughly equivalent to the GDP of the UK. Fortis bank has a leverage ratio of “only” 33, but its liabilities are three times the GDP of its home country of Belgium.
With banks that have outgrown their home turf, national treasuries and regulators in Europe are living on borrowed time: they cannot simply develop “road maps” (the only result of various Ecofin discussions of regulatory reform by finance ministers), but must contemplate a worst-case scenario.
Given that solutions for the largest institutions can no longer be found at the national level it is apparent that the European Central Bank will need to be put in charge as it is the only institution that can issue unlimited amounts of a global reserve currency. The authorities in the UK and Switzerland – which cannot rely on the ECB – can only pray that no accident happens to the giants they have in their own garden.
The Euro hasn't "profited" that much from this crisis. It went up again about five to eight cents to around 1.45 to 1.47x, but that's far from its high earlier this year when it stayed around 1.57 for weeks.
Investors don't really trust the European economies at the moment, and hence not the Euro. They rather invest in bonds than in currencies.
At least that's what I got told.
If I were German I'd be wanting to leave the eurozone and preserve the value of my Deutschmark.
On March 18, 2008, a “closed door” session of Congress was held for only the fourth time in history. According to House Rule XVII, clause 9, it is forbidden for members of the U.S. House of Representatives to reveal the discussions held behind those doors. The penalty for leaking such information includes loss of seniority, fines, reprimand, censure or expulsion. According to news sources, one purpose of the meetings was to discuss new surveillance techniques to be used by U.S. Homeland Security. Rumors continue to swirl as to what the other topics of discussion took place in that meeting.
According to the Australia.TO newspaper, as reported in the May 2008 Last Trumpet Newsletter (LTM), several congressmen were so incensed about what was discussed behind those doors that they were compelled to leak the contents of the meeting. Following is what is rumored to have been discussed: Imminent collapse of the U.S. economy by September 2008; imminent collapse of the U.S. Government finances by February 2009; possibility of civil war within the U.S. resulting from the collapse; detainment of “insurgent U.S. citizens” in anticipation of their moving against the government; the potential for violent action taken by citizens against members of Congress due to the collapses; the merger of the U.S. economy with those of Canada and Mexico as a solution to the collapse; the introduction of a new tri-national currency called the “AMERO” as another economic solution.
Needless to say, that’s a lot of information to process. Unfortunately none of it can be verified and it essentially falls under the category of rumor and as such must be treated as suspect.
Haha, gotta love labels. I prefer devil's advocate
If anyone couldn't see the financial crisis looming in the near future earlier this year, than he or she has been living under a rock. There's nothing sinister going on. We had a President who did not know how to manage the economy, along with corrupt CEOs and financial institutions who were more interested in padding their Swiss bank accounts than being honest and fair to the American people.
Paranoid bloggers can ramble all they want about secret government plots that sound like another bad Matrix sequel, but financial experts predicted this for a couple years now.
I wasn't addressing you, with the "paranoid" comment.
I think the Internet and blogging, in particular, is a double-edged sward. It allows the flow of thoughts and ideas in a manner we haven't seen before, but it also allows anyone, regardless of how little they know about a subject at hand, to ramble about it incessantly.
Er, what?? That IS sinister. If that isn't sinister, then what the fuck is?
'Financial experts' - which financial experts? Not the ones on Fox, CNN and MSNBC, surely? Bloomberg is a bit better. At least they show a range of opinions. But, by and large, the only financial experts who predicted this were the people you label as internet weirdoes and 'paranoid bloggers'.
But anyway, with regard to predicting the financial crisis, the scores at this stage are:-
Score one to the 'paranoid bloggers'.
Score ZERO to the mainstream media.
Oh I know, thanks for clarifying though. My response was to financeguy's warning.
Agree 100%. I was attempting to demonstrate how paranoid themes stem from actual events to see if it would spark some debate.
I meant "sinister" in the sense of it not being some secret government plot to somehow merge with Mexico and Canada and put millions of random people in prison or beam them up to space or whatever the wack job in the blog cited earlier in this thread was talking about. There's a big difference between an intelligent, rational person well-versed in the economy and the financial market posting their observations about what they feel could happen.
I saw that article at the time, the third link you posted.
Of course, posting articles like that on FYM is what gets you labelled a 'conspiracy theorist'.