--UPDATED-- Rating agency Standard & Poors (S&P) appears to do all it can to further wreck its status. According to a Bloomberg story from Tuesday S&P had downgraded three AAA-rated commercial mortgage-backed debt papers only a week ago to BBB-, the lowest investment-grade rating. Low ... Read more

The calls for shutting down the Federal Reserve are rapidly growing into a chorus. William Greider , author of undeniably the best book about the Fed, " Secrets of the Temple - How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country " chimes in these days too. His book was my first milestone on the never endin ... Read more

What is the problem of the Federal Reserve that it does neither want to publish who got the $1.2 trillion it pumped into the banking system nor who are its owners . Watch Fed vice chairman Donald Kohn evading any questions that would shine a little more light on the Fed's interventions in the b ... Read more

--UPDATED-- ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet was quite complacent at the last council meeting . And for the first time since the beginning of what was first called subprime, then credit crunch, only to morph into a recession by now, markets seem to agree with Trichet. There is a glimmer at the ... Read more

Austria's series of bad headlines does not stop . According to a paper by the Rechnungshof, literally Austrias General Accounting Office, Federal Financing Agency OeBFA sits on 1.8% of all issued US Structured Investment Vehicles (SIV), counting so far €616 million of losse ... Read the ... Read more

I may have missed one or the other suspension of gold coin sale s by the US Mint . But here we go again: Checking the online store of the US Mint I came across notices of delays and suspensions with golden Eagles and Buffaloes with waiting times between weeks and further notice. The US Mint ... Read more

Continuing the series of sunny summer day bloggin' lite please enjoy the video below. For those busy with saving the world from its banks irresponsibilities, read the quotes and find yourself in a financial world bare of any Chinese walls. It's all run and done' by Goldman Sachs, with the help of ... Read more

Catch this graph of brand new credit rankings by European credit insurer Coface: Stable at lower levels at best, no positive outlook anywhere. This chart found in Austrian daily " Der Standard ": GRAPH: European map by credit rankings. The eventual bottoming out of the global margin call is ... Read more

In a world drowning in some 64.000 AAA rated CDO and CDS (credit debt obligations/swaps) Moody's has - 3 to 4 years late - but correctly recognised the public's demand for information on all these papers, posing a TRILLION risk for the entire financial globe. They must be eager to get out word ... Read more

Observing nowadays' financial news I notice to have been reading and hearing a lot about the "too big to fail" (TBTF) theory since the onset of the credit crisis. There is only one fundamental problem: Not one former TBTF-candidate has remained alive much longer once this discussion had been started ... Read more