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The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
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Be Your Own Counterfeiter
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Being Tim Geithner
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Notes From a Press Conference Naif
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What Good is the News?
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Stressful Enough
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Not Regretting the Pound
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Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
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Non-Economic Questions of the Day
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The Stress Test Blind Alley
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Happy Hour
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Recovery Without Rebalancing
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The Shape of Your Recession
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Why is the Fed Discriminating Against Investment Banks?
In ES Browning's WSJ stocks report today, he mentions something I haven't seen anywhere else:
Traders pointed to several culprits for the stock pullback: warnings from Bank of America and Wachovia of more credit-loss provisions to come, a gloomy-sounding comment from Canada's central bank governor, rumors of more write-downs at other financial institutions, surging oil prices and a comment from the Federal Reserve that its new bailout program wouldn't be available to investment banks.
Let's not get into the question of whether the Fed's new facility is a bailout for the time being. The big question is: why on earth isn't it available to investment banks? And where can I find this comment?
The policy certainly seems weird to me, since many of the biggest investment banks (JPMorgan, UBS, Deutsche, Citi, etc) are also commercial banks and therefore will have access to the new facility – thereby giving them what seems to be an unfair advantage over the pure investment banks like Goldman, Lehman, and Bear. Or am I missing something here?
