The Institutional Risk Analyst

The IRA is writing today from Camp Kotok, which is held each year at Leen’s Lodge in Grand Lake Stream, Maine. We are in Washington County, which is on the border of New Brunswick, Canada, and about 200 miles north of Bangor up Rt 9. This is Down East Maine, the land of Thoreau with rolling hills and lots of beautiful rivers and lakes.

"[F]rom early spring throughout 2009 and until mid-year 2010, the Fed engaged in the first major quantitative easing program of purchases of government agency debt and agency-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities. The Fed’s purchases reached a cumulative total of $1.285 trillion, and excess reserves reached nearly $1 trillion. Essentially, the new reserves provided by the purchases program enabled the banking system to fund the repayment of about $1 trillion of various forms

May 29, 2017 | 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 e