News
Bloomberg | Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s two-year fight to shield crisis-squeezed banks from the stigma of revealing their public loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.
Bloomberg | Libya-Owned Arab Banking Corp. Drew at Least $5 Billion From Fed in Crisis
Arab Banking Corp., the lender part- owned by the Central Bank of Libya, used a New York branch to get 73 loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve in the 18 months after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed.
WSJ | Fed Official Sees Rates Inching Up This Year
The president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank said Thursday the Fed may need to increase short-term interest rates by year's end if underlying inflation rises as he anticipates.
The Economist | They’re bust. Admit it.
Greece, Ireland and Portugal should restructure their debts now.
The Economist | The muck of the Irish
The stress-tests results unveiled today by Ireland’s central bank require that four banks—Allied Irish Banks, Bank of Ireland, EBS Building Society and Irish Life & Permanent—must raise an extra €24 billion of capital to meet a minimum core Tier-1 capital ratio of 6% under the tests’ worst-case assumptions.
The Economist | Trigger-happy
The European Central Bank is planning to raise rates too soon.
The Economist | Hard landing
Land has gone from being the safest of bets to the riskiest.
CNN: Money | Fed lent to all comers in crisis
Banks weak and strong from all over the world flocked to the Fed's discount window during the financial crisis.
Econ Comments
Barron's | What Can Y2K Tell Us About QE2?
The tech bubble was inflated and burst by the Fed's injection of liquidity. Will the past prove to be prologue?
Minyanville | Brazil's Inflation Targets Postponed Until 2012
Brazilian authorities are looking to bring inflation down to 4.5% by 2012 rather than this year.
Minyanville | Wal-Mart Sees Inflation, Fed Sees iPad Price Counterbalance
The benefit of falling iPad prices is only felt by a few million consumers. The extreme rise in food prices is felt by anyone who eats.
Blogs
Daily Capitalist | OECD Inflation Watch For February
The annual inflation rate jumped to 2.6% from 2.4% in February, the highest level since October 2008 when the rate was 3.2%, the European Union’s Eurostat agency said in a flash, or preliminary, estimate.
NRO: Exchequer | Ben Bernanke and the Second Deficit
Of course there are trade-offs from inflation: but practically all of the costs fall on savers and investors, and all of the benefits accrue to debtors and spenders. I do not much like those incentives. Two percent inflation costs $1.4 trillion a year: Don’t forget the second deficit.
