Business

There were plenty of bad actors that contributed to the housing crisis in 2009...the banks that underwrote mortgages for people that they knew couldn't afford the home they were buying and then turned around and sold those loans to unsuspecting insurance companies via RMBS structures...the high school janitor making $50,000 a year who suddenly figured he could afford a $750,000 home...the 22-year-old Las Vegas stripper who took out millions in mortgages so she could make "easy money" flipping homes...there was plenty of blame to go around. 

 The following article by David Haggith was published on The Great Recession Blog:

Is the Federal Reserve’s Great Unwind already coming unwound? I thought it would be good to check up on Federal Reserve balance sheet reduction since the Fed is supposed to be up and running on the move out of quantitative easing this month. It should be fascinating to see what progress the Fed is making as it happily applauds its own successful recovery. 

The Federal Reserve balance sheet reduction that didn’t happen

While Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio and Larry Fink have all revealed themselves to be skeptics of bitcoin, accusing it of being a bubble, at best, and a fraud, at worst, one longtime investor who made his name scooping up “value” stocks in the 1990s has quietly posted astonishing returns betting on the digital currency, predating a wave of more than 100 asset-management shops that have sprung up to manage portfolios of cryptocurrencies.

As US GDP growth rises at 3% or more for the second quarter in a row, French investment bank Natixis urges investors to prepare for the U.S. economy to "slow down substantially" as early as 2018.

https://player.cnbc.com/p/gZWlPC/cnbc_global

Patrick Artus, chief economist at Natixis, warned that the current level of corporate investment is "abnormally high" and suggested a downward correction.

How things change in crypto - in January 2017, before the crackdown by the authorities, China accounted for nearly 100% of bitcoin trading...

In the “golden era” of Chinese crypto trading, mainland operators built up considerable expertise before they were forced out of business. Some of those operators of Chinese exchanges are setting up again in “friendlier” jurisdictions around Asia, as Bloomberg reports, and their aspirations are global.