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  • Feb 20, 10

    In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe's monetary union, Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe's deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.

    www.nytimes.com/...14debt.html Wall Street Europe Banks Greed Goldman Sachs Business Politics

    • Wall Street did not create Europe’s debt problem. But bankers enabled Greece and others to borrow beyond their means, in deals that were perfectly legal. Few rules govern how nations can borrow the money they need for expenses like the military and health care. The market for sovereign debt — the Wall Street term for loans to governments — is as unfettered as it is vast.

      “If a government wants to cheat, it can cheat,” said Garry Schinasi, a veteran of the International Monetary Fund’s capital markets surveillance unit, which monitors vulnerability in global capital markets.

    • Banks eagerly exploited what was, for them, a highly lucrative symbiosis with free-spending governments. While Greece did not take advantage of Goldman’s proposal in November 2009, it had paid the bank about $300 million in fees for arranging the 2001 transaction, according to several bankers familiar with the deal.

  • Feb 06, 10

    In times of crisis, good news is no news. Iceland's meltdown made headlines; the remarkable stability of Canada's banks, not so much. Yet as the world’s attention shifts from financial rescue to financial reform, the quiet success stories deserve at least as much attention as the spectacular failures. We need to learn from those countries that evidently did it right. And leading that list is our neighbor to the north. Right now, Canada is a very important role model.

    www.nytimes.com/...01krugman.html Opinion Banks Canada

    • Over the past decade the United States and Canada faced the same global environment. Both were confronted with the same flood of cheap goods and cheap money from Asia. Economists in both countries cheerfully declared that the era of severe recessions was over.
    • But when things fell apart, the consequences were very different here and there. In the United States, mortgage defaults soared, some major financial institutions collapsed, and others survived only thanks to huge government bailouts. In Canada, none of that happened. What did the Canadians do differently?

  • Aug 28, 08

    All 3 parts of the series can be accessed from this Part 1 bookmark.

    www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2008061401479.html Business Banks Great Recession

    • Seen in the best possible light, the housing bubble that began inflating in the mid-1990s was "a great national experiment," as one prominent economist put it -- a way to harness the inventiveness of the capitalist system to give low-income families, minorities and immigrants a chance to own their homes. But it also is a classic story of boom, excess and bust, of homeowners, speculators and Wall Street deal-makers happy to ride the wave of easy money even though many knew a crash was inevitable.

  • Feb 07, 09

    www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009012104267.html U.S. Government Banks

    • At least 30 banks since 2000 have escaped federal regulatory action by walking away from their federal regulators and moving under state supervision, taking advantage of a long-standing system that allows banks to choose between federal and state oversight.     The moves, known as charter conversions, highlight the tremendous leverage that banks hold in their relationships with government supervisors.

  • Dec 24, 08

    apnews.myway.com/...D957KNQG0.html Business Banks Your Tax Dollars At Work

    • It's something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where's the money going? But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.

  • Oct 31, 08

    www.nytimes.com/...25nocera.html Your Tax Dollars At Work Business Banks

    • The dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the bailout money to make new loans. But this executive was the first insider who’s been indiscreet enough to say it within earshot of a journalist.

  • Jan 26, 08

    www.nytimes.com/...20Ben-Bernanke-t.html Housing Banks

    • Ben Bernanke’s first exposure to monetary policy was reading the works of Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate. That was 30 years ago, when Bernanke was a graduate student at M.I.T., and he has been studying central banking ever since. By the time President Bush nominated him to run the Federal Reserve, at the end of 2005, Bernanke knew more about central banking than any economist alive... For Bernanke, who is now 54, it has been an education unlike any at M.I.T. The current crisis is a hangover from a half-decade of heady speculation in both housing and home mortgages and does not necessarily admit to a speedy fix. None other than Alan Greenspan has said that the constellation of problems facing Bernanke is tougher than anything he experienced in the 18 years that he held the job.

  • Aug 20, 07

    www.nytimes.com/...19wwln-idealab-t.html History Banks

    • But what if the last few years of playing fast and loose with credit were not a deviation from the norm but a return to America’s economic roots? Though it is hardly the sort of thing you read about in heroic histories of America’s rise to economic greatness, the credit system in the United States has often been, in effect, a confidence game writ large, relying heavily on shaky paper promises, shell games and other trickery.
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