Back in 2012, BNP Paribas exited the North American reserve-based lending market, when it sold its RBL unit to Wells in an effort to shore up its balance sheet amid the turmoil generated by the eurozone debt crisis.
A little over two years later, in the fall of 2014, BNP got back into the RBL game in the US. That probably wasn’t a good idea.
Yesterday morning, when musing on the day's key event namely Yellen's congressional testimony, we dismissed the most recent bout of European bank euphoria which we said "will be brief if not validated by concrete actions, because while central banks have the luxury of jawboning, commercial banks are actually burning through funds - rapidly at that - and don't have the luxury of hoping for the best while doing nothing." This morning DB has wiped out all of yesterday's gain.
“In the long run democracy will be judged, no less than other forms of government, by the quality of its leaders, a quality that will depend in turn on the quality of their vision. Where there is no vision, we are told, the people perish; but where there is sham vision, they perish even faster.” – Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership
Submitted by JC Collins via PhilosophyOfMetrics.com,
For the first time in a long time I feel concerned and worried about the prospect of war. The reaction of Saudi Arabia to the Russian intervention in Syria has always been the wild card in the shifting geopolitical power base in the Middle East. Turkey and Israel, along with Saudi Arabia are the three countries with the most to lose because of a strong alliance between Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia.
When Barack Obama swept into the White House in 2008, the American electorate was hoping for “change.”
A “change” in the way Republicans and Democrats interacted with one another, a “change” in how the US is perceived by the rest of the world, and a “change” in Washington’s notoriously poor foreign policy in the Mid-East.