Wednesday, June 03, 2009

general financial commentary

If you are not reading The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz (and friends), I must recommend it. Over and over and over. As you can tell by my highly monetized site, the only compensation I get is that you will be slightly closer to understanding the realities of the financial world.

Several links form the site:
* Great commentary on how the the bailouts hurt smaller banks that were well run, conservative (like they should be), made prudent loans, and had both the interests of themselves and their clients in mind.
* The lifestyle many people should have been pursuing when they were chasing McMansions and SUVs.
* A bit of unintentional comedy, but maybe we should be worried about how much longer it will still be true for.
* This links diurectly to a .pdf. A great breakdown of why things will get worse, possibly much worse before theyt get better.
* Corporate profits are getting squeezed. Well, duh. This reminds me of the latest SLB earnings conference call when the issue came up about the better-than-expected margins and the timing of cost cutting measures. Disciplined cost cutting is not the path to economic growth. It is simply a stop gap measure to protect margins and maintain slightly better financial health. And it is not repeatable.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bring back the
Glass-Steagall Act