Lagarde Urges 'Mandatory' Recapitalization of EU Banks to Avert Contagion

Lagarde Urges 'Mandatory' Recapitalization of EU Banks to Avert Contagion Bloomberg The stress tests on 90 European banks published on July 15 showed eight lenders had a combined 2.5 billion-euro ($3.6 billion) capital shortfall, failing to ease concern that many of them remain vulnerable to a potential sovereign default. ...

European officials to be pressed on action to ease fiscal crisis Irish Times THE EUROPEAN Parliament will press top officials next week for firmer action to tackle the region's debt crisis, with common bonds and a stronger euro zone rescue fund likely to anchor the debate. European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet ...

All Together Now New York Times The producer-savers in northern Europe are now drawing up a new deal with the overspenders — the PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. It is unlikely that the Germans would just break out of the European Union, since a good chunk of their...

Greek Notes Slump on Concern Aid Deal Will Fail; Bunds Decline Bloomberg The ECB has bought government bonds in each of the past three weeks in a bid to stave offcontagion from Greece, Ireland and Portugal and bring 10-year yields from Spain and Italy to around 5 percent. Yields of both nations' debt surged to euro- era ...

Role Reversal in Global Finance Brookings Institution ... major reserve currency areas (US, Euro Area, Japan, UK). The recent global financial crisis has, if anything, accentuated the incentives for accumulating reserves for self-insurance purposes that will keep foreign demand for these bonds strong. 4. ...

Daily Stock Alert Barron's During the financial crisis, von Strachwitz noticed solid blue-chip German senior debt, including paper issued by the country's largest car makers and landesbanks—state-owned banks—selling for around 70 European cents on the euro. ...

The Man Who Broke the Bank of Europe GuruFocus.com The only other alternative is to agree to full fiscal union and issue eurozone bonds backed by the entire euro area, effectively allowing the PIIGS credit risk to be assumed by Germany. For Canadian investors, I reiterate my advice from my last column. ...

Desperate times present disparate opportunities gulfnews.com All we are seeing today is part of the US [downgrade] contagion effect. While inflation is a key negative, oil price drops will significantly assist inflation controls making the current time a good entry point." Of course it's Rajgopal's job to sell ...

How to Turn a Continent Into a Subprime CDO truthout We need to remember that what we refer to today as the 'European Sovereign Debt Crisis' began as a private sector financial crisis back in 2008, when 'too big to fail banks,' writing deep out of the money options on taxpayers, quite unexpectedly (to ...

Hitting the Panic Button Barron's Who would have imagined, for instance, that the financial crisis would become a credit crisis that drove the yields on high-yield bonds to extreme premiums over those on Treasury securities? How many investors and advisors have set parameters on when ...

The Rescue That Missed Main Street New York Times As Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission back in May 2010, “I was never able to explain to the American people in a way in which they understood it why these rescues were for them and for ...

Fed and other regulators need policing: economist Reuters While regulatory reform since the 2007-09 financial crisis has given added clout to government regulators, the concentration of power is likely to do more harm than good unless the regulators themselves are subject to proper oversight, Brown University ...

IPO market dries up Los Angeles Times Companies have withdrawn their initial public stock offerings at the fastest pace since the 2008 global financial crisis, as gun-shy investors lose interest in anything seen as even marginally risky. The diminished appetite for IPOs stems partially ...

Germans Start to Question Their Economic Resilience New York Times If the Germans were doing well, so was the euro zone. The second- and third-largest economies in the zone, France and Italy, were usually seen as doing worse than Germany. By the time thefinancial crisis hit bottom in the spring of 2009, ...

Zerka's future is within sight Boston Globe By Frank Dell'Apa FOXBOROUGH - Greece's financial crisis hit the country's soccer teams hard. The Salonika club GS Iraklis was relegated to the second division because of unpaid debts, and several players filed a lawsuit against the club for nonpayment ...

Eurobank, Alpha Bank May Announce Merger as Early as Sunday Wall Street Journal A second person said the two lenders have been in merger talks for months and that the Greekfinancial crisis might have forced them to speed up negotiations. "If everything goes well, and there are no last-minute problems, the boards of the two banks ...

North Dakota enjoys the spoils of full employment Minneapolis Star Tribune That happened during the oil bust of the early 1980s and, briefly, in 2008, when hundreds of rigs went quiet in the wake of the financial crisis and lower oil prices. Until or unless that happens, go ahead and chalk up North Dakota's good fortune to ...

Wall Street Braces for a Real Storm Wall Street Journal Three years after Wall Street weathered a financial crisis often likened to a giant storm, the financial world was bracing for Hurricane Irene to deliver an unwanted dose of the real thing. The storm's approach prompted the New York Stock Exchange to ...

Ben Dov's Debt Sinks Partner Communications: Israel Overnight Bloomberg “It's contagion more than anything,” said Richard Gussow, an analyst at Deutsche Bank AG in Te Aviv. “Because you're related to them you are subject to the same concern.” Israel's Ministry of Communications is seeking to introduce new mobile-phone ...

FDIC orders Central Progressive Bank to take steps to shore up finances NOLA.com "There are banks that have been inadequately capitalized that have found a merger partner or raised more capital," said Wilson, who studies bank bailouts and thefinancial crisis. "If the hole is relatively small, or the prospects look promising, ...

A monetary route worth taking? Independent.co.ug Due to the high level of financial interdependence among euro zone countries, fears of contagionspread like wild fire in Europe's financial markets. Experts point to the trajectory of the EMU in the early 2000's; as Germany, the union's biggest ...

Australian bank chief Stevens asks China to strengthen yuan 'Chinese currency ... Arab Times Kuwait English Daily ... to guide the currency higher, with the yuan rising steadily against the US dollar since mid-2010 when Beijing relaxed a de-facto peg to the US currency. This had been imposed in 2008 to protect its exporters during the global financial crisis. ...

Will SBI Gold Fund shine your portfolio? Equitymaster.com With Greece's failure to put its public finances in place has caused a situation of a debt overhang in the Euro zone, and is also spreading a contagion to the other countries in the Euro zone. In India, while the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has ...

Washington Should Try a Little Prudent Self-Restraint New York Times Instead Congress cut taxes and increased spending, leaving nothing saved when the 2008 financial crisis hit. THAT history led to our current mess. With the excess capacity in the construction industry and millions of unemployed workers, ...

Fed's moves to aid economy since financial crisis Newsday (subscription) Click here Fed's moves to aid economy since financial crisis Published: August 26, 2011 4:43 PM By The Associated Press The Associated Press () The Federal Reserve has taken many unprecedented steps in the past three years to try to boost the economy ...

Be Like Buffett Barron's Other preferreds from JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo yield closer to 7%, which looks reasonably attractive, given much-improved capital levels since the 2008 financial crisis and low yields on US Treasuries. Bank of America is the leading issuer ...

Good, Bad and Ugly Barron's Likewise, just about all of the $165 billion in federal stimulus money that had helped to close state budget gaps since the 2008-09 financial crisis has been spent. Thus, the cuts for fiscal 2012, which for most states began last month, promise to be ...

Sen. Warner: $4 trillion debt deal shouldn't be 'heavy lift' The Hill (blog) In any case, what Reagan inherited was arguably a more severe financial crisis than what was dropped in Mr. Obama's lap. You don't believe it? FACT: From 1967 to 1982 stocks lost two-thirds of their value relative to inflation, according to a new ...

Eric Cantor on the economy: All talk, no sensible ideas Washington Post His attacks on regulation, in general, indicate a determined indifference to the regulatory and political vacuum that prompted the financial crisis and recession. His attacks on the EPA, in particular, reflect his lack of concern for the toxic ...

Top 100 Indies Barron's He then plowed the proceeds into mortgages -- the dreaded asset class at the core of the financial crisis. He's been favoring mortgage REITs like American Capital Agency Corp., calling them well-positioned to bulk with borrowed money. ...

Jobs Exits; Irene Looms; Buffett Steps In Wall Street Journal Meanwhile, demand for high-yield, or "junk," bonds is drying up, with August issuance at the lowest since the depths of the financial crisis. Crude oil turned up, rising 3.6% for the week to $85.37 a barrel. US banks increased lending for the first ...

Offsetting Behaviour: Light-rail disease By Eric Crampton Forget AIDS or SARS, there's a new billion-dollar contagion popping up across the country. Symptoms include visions of grandeur, severe loss of reality and a propensity to enact massive tax hikes. It's called LRTS: Light-rail transit syndrome. ... Offsetting Behaviour

Price of gold breaks record high | China business news By CBN Those factors include: fear of a global slowdown or financial crisis like the one in 2008, devaluation of the dollar and the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates low. “Gold is a safe haven,” Huprich said. “Gold has outperformed stocks for the ... China business news