There are private firms that insure mortgages. Now they are in the soup with all the delinquencies in the housing market.  Should the insurers go out of business, then what?  This is another clue that the sub prime mess is far from over.

Fresh Produce like avocados or bell peppers has to be sold ni a certain time period or the vegetable spoils. This keeps such markets at an equilibrium of supply and demand with prices reflecting the seasonality of the product. This is not the case with items that can be stored like say cotton.  When cotton…

A column in Portfolio.com links to a blog explaining the GM writedown. As the blog suggests,  how much of GM’s perceived $210 B market cap is actually a bet that the company is too big to fail.  The blogger makes the point that this charge is more than GM has made in the last several…

Here is an interesting study of optimism.   There seems to be a middle ground of optimism and pessimism, with optimism winning the day, except for one profession.  This is an interesting article, your take?

I have written extensively about the sub prime crisis and the housing bubble in this blog.  The reality of all that is now coming home.  A couple of you breezily suggested earlier this week in a post that, somehow in the short space of one week, everything was now AOK at CITI.  A glance at…

GM announced it took a $39 B loss reserve.   But cash was not affected nor the ability to take the tax credits in the future. It seems the FASB in their wisdom came up with this sort of impairment charge. If you lose money for the same three consecutive quarters you have to write down…

Robert Samuelson takes a measure of the current economy and recessions past, not such a bad thing he surmises. Do you know the difference between a recession and a depression?  It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job but a depression when you lose yours…

Well click here to see the speech Mike Douglas made in Wall Street about this. If the link does not work just go to YouTube and put in Mike Douglass Greed Speech Wall Street. I responded in the thread to Jerry’s question about why people make loans to poor credit risks and why people borrow…

Linda Craib is entering the Yale Health Care MBA program.  Her background is strikingly similar to many or our students at UNT Dallas. Can we learn something from her experience?  I wonder what she thought lay ahead with three kids and a degree in art history. I appreciate art as much as anyone, but did…

As usual Jerry Flint sees the Big Picture.  This article details recent problems at Toyota.  It seems Toyota has been virtually unstoppable, but now there are a rash of bad news events. It is nothing really major yet but..certainly the departure of some top Toyota execs to join, gulp, Chrysler, has raised eyebrows. You can…