The Institutional Risk Analyst

The good news is that Webster is not a bad bank and SAN is not overpaying, although the low level of capital and reserves may represent be a significant expense for SAN in the near term. We kind of liked the fact that SAN’s management team had avoided another bank acquisition and instead focused on consumer finance...

The Powell Fed needs to drop short-term interest rates back down to 4% and leave them there indefinitely.

Benevolence, as Chris and I noted in our book "Financial Stability," always gets you more bang for the buck than being miserable.

For some time now, we have been concerned that the FOMC’s overt manipulation of credit spreads has embedded future credit losses on the balance sheets of US banks. But now we are starting to see even greater signs of stress as the large Wall Street banks again return to derivatives in order to manufacture the appearance of profitability.

Below follows an extended soliloquy by my friend and mentor Fred Feldkamp, who was a partner at Foley & Lardner in Detroit, about how the SEC’s changes to Rule 2-a7 in 1998 caused the failure of LTCM.