The Institutional Risk Analyst

Financials swooned this week as investors now seem to accept that much of the Trump program is in doubt – at least for 2017. No surprise then that yesterday large-cap financials actually closed down for the year. In our last edition of The Institutional Risk Analyst, "Macro-Prudential Delusions: Bank Credit Outlook 2H 2017," we referred to how in April the forward guidance from Capital One Financial (NYSE:COF) caused financials to begin their swoon six weeks ago. The bank’s

In the mid 2000s, just before the financial crisis began, US banks were reporting credit metrics for all asset classes in loan portfolios that were quite literally too good to be true. And they were. The cost of bad credit decisions was hidden, for a time, by rising asset prices. The same aggressive, low-rate environment used by the Fed to artificially stoke growth in the early 2000s has been repeated in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, only to a greater extreme. Today US