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Hollywood is quickly losing its grip on the kind of easy money once readily available through Wall Street. The collapse of Paramount Pictures' $450-million film financing deal underscores how dramatically the global credit crunch is prompting weary investors and several industry-friendly banks to shy away from a popular form of funding that has fueled Hollywood's production growth in recent years. The pullback could set the studios scrambling to find alternative sources of capital to help mitigate risk on their movie slates as filmmaking and marketing costs continue to climb. With the debt markets depressed and money drying up, studios like...

Merrill Lynch has warned that the United States could face a foreign "financing crisis" within months as the full consequences of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage debacle spread through the world. The country depends on Asian, Russian and Middle Eastern investors to fund much of its $700bn (£350bn) current account deficit, leaving it far more vulnerable to a collapse of confidence than Japan in the early 1990s after the Nikkei bubble burst. Britain and other Anglo-Saxon deficit states could face a similar retreat by foreign investors. "Japan was able to cut its interest rates to zero," said Alex...

Ok folks, its time for a long sit-down type of Ticker - the sort that I usually don't write. Let's start with Fannie and Freddie. As anyone who has been reading The Ticker knows, I have been saying for quite some time that Fannie and Freddie are in fact "short to zero" candidates for the common stock. This is simply due to the mathematics of their financial situation - they are levered up anywhere from 60 to more than 200:1, depending on what you include and exclude from "capital" and "credit book." I use the worst-case set of numbers, because...

The credit crunch has hit home in Hollywood after Paramount Pictures, which has released a string of hit movies this year, was forced to suspend plans for a $450m film financing. The studio has been working with Deutsche Bank on financing that would have provided funds for up to 30 films, including possible blockbusters such as the sequel to Transformers and a new version of Star Trek. However, Deutsche has decided to close its film finance unit and concentrate on other areas. With the Paramount deal proving difficult to close because of a market-wide lack of enthusiasm for the senior...

Sometimes the markets just get things wrong. It doesn't happen very often. Usually the market's collective wisdom is more perceptive than the individual opinions of the investors who comprise it. But every now and then - about twice every decade - markets make spectacular blunders, completely losing touch with the real economy of consumption, investment, employment and world trade.

Every time I saw a car towing a motorboat this holiday weekend, I wondered what was going through the head of the towee. Did they have a sense that darkness was falling on their careers in motor sports? Did they have an inkling that an oil-and-gas crisis is upon us and just not give a shit? Or were they just going through the motions, following some implacable rote programming induced by, say, forty-odd years of TV addiction and a diet based on corn-syrup byproducts? The holiday to me was a creepy hiatus from an ever more desperate reality overtaking the...

Perhaps the defining feature of the global economy in the past few decades has been its increasing financialization. Capital flows have moved rapidly across borders, financial engineering has grown by leaps and bounds and both leverage and speculation have increased manifold. The centrality of finance to the global economy has been brought home recently in more ways than one. First, the subprime mortgages in the US, which few people outside that country had even heard of, found their way into the portfolios of many investors outside the US. Next, the series of rate cuts by the US central bank, in...

This isn't so funny anymore. Intimations of a July banking collapse rumbled though the Internet this weekend while mainstream news orgs like The New York Times and CNN pulled their puds over swift boats and Amy Winehouse's performance technique. Something is happening, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones...? to quote the master. What's happening is that American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we're gripped by inflation or deflation. It's certainly deceptive. Food and gasoline prices...

<p>The telling moment last week was Robert Hirsch's appearance on the CNBC morning "Squawkbox" financial show in which he proposed the probability of $500-a-barrel oil within "a three-to-five-year time-frame." Squawkhead Becky Quick was clearly nonplussed by the stolid Mr. Hirsch, author of a (then)-startling 2005 US Dept of Energy report (since referred to as the Hirsch Report and buried by the Secretary of Energy) that warned of dire effects on the American way of life as the Peak Oil predicament gained traction.</p>

New startups hoping to make their mark on the space industry still face high entry barriers just to cover their initial costs, investors said Wednesday. (snip) "I am passionately committed to prizes," Gingrich said. "The great power of prizes is simple; they allow anybody anywhere who's competent to try and solve a problem."

New York, June 6: Indian IT major Infosys is finding it difficult to expand the presence in neighbouring China and the time taken to receive payments there is up to nine times of the global average, its CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan has said. "We are finding it difficult to expand in the Chinese market. The business environment, and the standards and processes are different," Gopalakrishnan said in an interview with the online edition of US business magazine Forbes. He said that another challenge in doing business in China is "getting accustomed to how Chinese companies do business with each other and...

The rise in the price of oil in recent years has meant a windfall of revenue for the oil-rich Middle East. This infusion of petrodollars has led some of the world's wealthiest Muslims to search for new ways to manage their wealth, investment opportunities that are consistent with the teachings of the Koran. The result has been a rapid growth in Islamic financing, with centers of activity in places as far apart as London, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Singapore. By some industry estimates, Islamic finance has grown worldwide during the past 20 years to $300 billion in bank assets....

Truths for a new world of them and us By Philip Stephens Published: May 29 2008 17:47 | Last updated: May 29 2008 17:47 Globalisation belonged to us; financial crises happened to them. The world has been turned on its head. Consumers in the wealthiest nations are struggling with the consequences of the credit crunch and with the soaring cost of energy and food. In China, retail sales have been rising at an annual 15 per cent. I cannot think of a better description of the emerging global order. The trouble is that the politics of globalisation lags ever further...

Dubai is picking up the mantle of the financial capital of the world, as global banking sectors London and New York continue to fade on the back of the global credit crises. The new mantra in New York and London is "Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai or goodbye", as job losses mount in both cities while opportunities in the east continue to rise. Lehman Brothers on Tuesday became the latest investment bank moving one of its most senior positions to the UAE. Philip Lynch, the bank's co-head of equities for Europe and the Middle East, will be relocating to Dubai after serving...

"Far from normal". Those were the words that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke used to describe the financial markets (and by extension the economy) these heady spring days when everybody else with a rostrum, it seems, has pronounced the so-called liquidity crisis contained. There's a great wish for American finance to return to business-as-usual -- raking in fantastic fees for innovating new modes of tradable paper, and engineering mergers and buy-outs that generate huge fees plus $100 million kiss-offs for corporate CEOs in the noble struggle to dismantle America's productive capacity -- but apparently events are still out of hand. The...

In responding to the subprime mortgage crisis, most Congressional Republicans and many Bush administration officials apparently believe they have time on their side. They are wrong. The housing bust is feeding on itself: price declines provoke foreclosures, which provoke more price declines. And the problem is not limited to subprime mortgages. There is an entirely different category of risky loans whose impact has yet to be felt — loans made to creditworthy borrowers but with tricky terms and interest rates that will start climbing next year. Yet the Senate Banking Committee goes on talking. It has failed as yet to...

Oil prices continue to rise and rise, with no end in sight. Virtually all other commodities seem to be following to be the same suit. Some now say a new economic system is emerging from the ashes of the old and now crumbling financial structure. Failing to meet even the basic needs of the common man, the current economic system is facing its worst crisis and appears in doldrums. It has miserably failed the underprivileged of this world. Markets appear divorced from the fundamentals. F. William Engdahl strongly says in a recent write up that the oil markets (and other...

In Zimbabwe, inflation is measured by the hour, not month-over-month as in America and the rest of the developed world. Zimbabwe’s few remaining merchants update their price tags four, five, or more times a day—that is, when shipments arrive on time, or haven’t been hijacked. For many people, life is a struggle just to get their paycheck to the store quickly enough so that it doesn’t lose value before it can be spent. Life is even harder for the millions who no longer have jobs at all—destroyed by an economy in meltdown. A report released by Zimbabwe’s Central Statistical Office...

WASHINGTON - John McCain's national finance co-chairman has stepped down, becoming the latest adviser to leave the Republican's presidential campaign because of ties to lobbyists. Former Texas Rep. Thomas G. Loeffler, one of McCain's key fundraisers, resigned after the campaign last week instructed staff to disclose all lobbying ties and to make certain they are no longer registered as lobbyists or foreign agents. McCain's campaign on Sunday confirmed Loeffler's resignation. Loeffler lobbies for the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., which with Northrop Grumman Corp. won a lucrative contract to provide air refueling tankers for the Air Force. McCain helped...

America May Well Be Only Halfway through the House-Price Bust < SOUNDING more like a cartographer than central banker, Ben Bernanke this week showed off the Federal Reserve's latest gizmo for tracking America's property bust: a series of maps that colour-code price declines, foreclosures and other gauges of housing distress for every county in the country. The Fed chairman's goal was to show graphically that falling prices meant more foreclosures, and he went on to urge lenders to write down the principal on troubled loans where the house is worth less than the value of the mortgage. But the jazzy...

Hard numbers: The economy is worse than you know Ever since the 1960s, Washington has gulled its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics, the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed. The corruption has tainted the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy: • The...

[WARNING: CONTAINS VULGARITY] As the West's industrial regime sputters toward a cheap-energy-crackup conclusion, there have been attempts to recast what our economy is actually about, how to account for whatever wealth we manage to produce, and project what our society will actually be organized to do in the years ahead. For a while in the 1990s, the idea was a "service economy," kind of like the old fable of the town whose inhabitants made a living by taking in each other's laundry -- only in our case it was selling hamburgers to tourists on vacation from their jobs making hamburgers...

Anyone that cares to learn about what is going on in the world is familiar with active jihad, the "holy war", conducted with terrorism and directed at the modern world in general and Western Civilization more specifically. But there is also another form of jihad that is part of the deliberate effort to have Islam replace all concepts of morality and the values held dear by the rest of us. The name of this silent "fifth column" effort is "Sharia Banking". Unfortunately, Sharia Banking is increasingly accepted by Western banking institutions without any real understanding of what the Muslim goal...

There has been much talk about Shari’a-compliant finance (SCF) in recent months, but many Americans are still in the dark about exactly what it is and what it portends for the American economy and the freedoms Americans enjoy. This may be why the judge in the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas last fall declared a mistrial and five of six defendants face a retrial (one was found not guilty of most of the charges against him). Terror expert Douglas Farah surmised at the time that part of the reason might have been because “perhaps the prosecution tried to cram...

The Conference Room: How You Get Fired In Finance Subject: Hey, do you have a minute? Either come to my office or we can meet in a conference room. Uh oh. Unless that email is coming from the co-worker you’ve been secretly dating or (one of) the secretaries you’re having an affair with, you’re probably going to be fired in the next 5-10 minutes if you see this subject line in your inbox. I usually write about how to get into investment banking, private equity and finance in general on this site. But with everything going on in the market...

The world is teetering on the edge of the worst recession for a generation, according to the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, the world’s third-largest sovereign wealth fund. Tony Tan, executive director of GIC, which has estimated assets of more than $300bn, told a global staff conference: “We could be facing a recession which is longer, deeper and wider than any recession that we have encountered in the last 30 years.” He added: “The financial and investment markets will be extremely nervous and volatile over the next one to two years. “Instead of the rising tide which [has] broadly benefited...

When I saw reports of food riots, I was reminded of these immortal words, often attributed to Marie Antoinette, although there is no evidence that she used them. The modern equivalent to “let them eat cake” is: “Core inflation is well contained.” Core inflation is a measure that excludes goods whose prices are currently rising the most – food and oil. It is a popular concept among some central bankers and academics, and an insult to consumers: let them eat refrigerators. The global rate of headline inflation is 4.5 per cent and rising. Some economists had us believe a year...

The US is offering foreign, minority investors in its companies an incentive to forgo board representation and other shareholder rights that convey “control” over a company, if they want to avoid a potential national security investigation. As reported in the Financial Times, proposed regulations released by the US Treasury on Monday made clear that investments under 10 per cent may be investigated by the Committee on Foreign Investment, the executive branch body that vets foreign deals on national security grounds. The proposed rule represents a departure from previous regulations, which said that, in most cases, investments under 10 per cent...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government should expect to lose up to $6 billion if a leading Democratic lawmaker's mortgage rescue plan is adopted, according to a Congressional memo citing non-partisan research. The legislation introduced by Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, would retool the Federal Housing Administration so that it could soak up more troubled loans. As outlined, the bill would allow the FHA to finance $300 billion of home loans and up to 2 percent of that amount is expected to be lost, according to a memo produced by Frank's office that cites research...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Hispanic homeowner sued Lehman Brothers Bank on Thursday, accusing the lender of charging minority mortgage applicants higher fees and interest rates than white customers. Pedro Rivas, who described himself as a Latino homeowner living in Pecoima, California, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, charging the wholly owned unit of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc with implementing a policy that causes "minority borrowers to pay subjective fees such as yield spread premiums and other mortgage-related finance charges at higher rates than similarly situated non-minority borrowers." Rivas said Lehman's "pattern of discrimination is not the result...

Analysis: How Iranians are Avoiding Sanctions April 14, 2008 The Financial Times Anna Fifield in Tehran When Shahrom, a Tehran developer, wants to transfer thousands of dollars to his property investment business in Dubai, or to associates in the US, he does not go to the bank. Instead, like thousands of other Iranian business people, he turns to his trusted money changer. Using a centuries-old financial transfer system known as havaleh in Iran and elsewhere as hawala, its Arabic name, Shahrom moves his money easily – and just about invisibly. “I usually transfer money into my own account in Dubai...

INDIANAPOLIS - The nation's system of public financing presidential elections is "creaky" and needs to be updated, Sen. Barack Obama said Friday, offering another possible argument for bypassing the three-decades-old system that has helped pay campaigns for the White House. Obama, who has raised a whopping $234 million from about 1.3 million donors, said the limited amounts of money available from the federal treasury for presidential campaigns pose difficult choices for candidates raising large sums. "I think that it is creaky," he said of the program financed by $3 dollar checkoffs in tax returns. "The amount of money raised through...

The board of the International Monetary Fund voted on Monday to cut 15 per cent of its staff and sell about $11bn (€7bn, £5.5bn) in gold reserves in one of the biggest shake-ups of its funding since it was founded. The IMF plan to cut 380 jobs and sell 403.3 tonnes of gold, about an eighth of its reserves, still has to be approved by other authorities. The reforms have the support of the US Treasury, but the gold sales must be approved by Congress, which is unlikely to happen until after the presidential elections this year. Other changes in...

Get Ready for Real Manipulation By Jon Nadler Apr 7 2008 9:02AM www.kitco.com Good Morning, Gold maintained a resilient tone in Asian trading overnight, oscillating between $910 and $920 as stock markets gained a bit on investor confidence. Support came from a $1 rise in oil to $107 per barrel but further gains were capped by the US dollar's climb to back over 72 on the index (72.23) despite some waning of the level of confidence in its immediate prospects for a significant recovery. More will be known about such prospects following this weekend's G-7 get-together. New York spot trading...

A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles — sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported. The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken. "You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same...

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plan for curing ailing financial markets received poor grades privately from House Republican leaders, though they mostly refrained from public criticism that would give Democrats ammunition in an election year. The senior Republican congressmen grumbled that the former Wall Street titan had made the same mistake as Sen. Hillary Clinton in crafting a major financial bailout. That makes it harder for markets to find their bottom, the critics say. What particularly irked the GOP lawmakers were Paulson’s comments to the press that his plan could not be enacted completely in just one year. Whatever the outcome...

It is a "leveraged planet," says the New York Times. It explains that an ounce of leverage in Manhattan is likely to turn into a pound of credit in Dubai…which could quite possibly fall as a ton of debt on someone's head in Norway. Norwegian fishermen were surprised when they discovered that they were taking losses from US subprime mortgage debt. So were German dentists. But that's just the way globalization works. We have nothing against it, but neither would we mind if there were less of it. Which raises the big question: is the leveraged planet becoming even more...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More Americans have fallen behind on consumer loans than at any time in nearly 16 years, as credit problems once concentrated in mortgages spread into other forms of debt. In a quarterly study, the American Bankers Association said the percentage of loans at least 30 days past due rose to 2.65 percent in the fourth quarter from 2.44 percent in the third quarter, and from 2.23 percent a year earlier. The rate of delinquencies was the highest since a 2.75 percent rate in the first quarter of 1992. It provides a fresh sign the nation's economy...

US senators expressed concern Thursday that billions of dollars in taxpayer funds has been put on the line to back the emergency takeover of troubled investment bank Bear Stearns. Republican Senator Jim Bunning branded the move an act of "socialism," as the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing into Bear Stearns' takeover by banking giant JPMorgan Chase. JPMorgan Chase agreed to take over Bear Stearns for just over one billion dollars last month in a deal backed by the US central bank which stumped up 29 billion dollars to support the transaction in exchange for collateral from Bear Stearns. The...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - IBM is under investigation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over an $80 million bid it made in 2006 to modernize EPA financial systems and has been suspended from seeking new contracts with all U.S. agencies, the company said on Monday. In addition, IBM said the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia had served IBM and certain employees with grand jury subpoenas requesting testimony and documents on interactions between the EPA and IBM employees. International Business Machines Corp, the world's largest provider of computer services, said it only learned on Friday of the...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Dell Inc (DELL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Monday it plans to save $3 billion annually over the next three years by closing its Austin, Texas desktop computer manufacturing plant and cutting thousands of jobs. The company's shares rose 1.1 percent following the announcement after closing up 1.6 percent on Nasdaq. Dell, the world's second-largest PC maker after Hewlett-Packard Co (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research), also repeated its goal of cutting 8,800 jobs, or about 10 percent of the work force, and said it will review "ownership alternatives" for its Dell Financial Services business. The company said...

NEW YORK (AP) - Commodities prices fell in a broad sell-off Monday as profit-taking on the last day of the quarter and a bearish U.S. agriculture report battered everything from precious metals to grains and energy futures. Relentless global demand for agricultural coupled with dwindling world stockpiles has exacerbated the supply crunch for wheat, soybeans and corn, which have spiked to historic levels in the past year. Hoping to capitalize on the boom, U.S. farmers are expected to plant about 75 million acres of soybeans and nearly 64 million acres of wheat in 2008, year-to-year increases of 18 percent and...

It has been almost 160 years since the first California gold rush but, with prices hitting record highs, prospectors are once again flocking to the state’s rivers and deserts in search of the precious metal. Gold’s ascent – prices crossed the $1,000 an ounce barrier this month and remain well above $900 – has sent sales of mining equipment soaring. “There’s been a dramatic change . . . our sales have risen four-fold in the last three months,” said Harrigan McGregor, owner of GoldFeverProspecting.com, an equipment retailer in northern California. “This is the second big California gold rush. We’ve had...

LONDON (Reuters) - Maybe, just maybe, the financial world is not about to implode. Such is the level of disaster mongering surrounding the latest phase of the eight-month-old credit crisis that you could be forgiven for thinking we will all soon be hoarding food and reverting to a barter economy. At the very least, some market pricing and financial commentary has invoked a systemic collapse akin to 1929's stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. Let's put that in context. U.S. historians estimate that in the first 10 months of 1930 some 744 U.S. banks failed -- rising...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bear Stearns Cos Inc (BSC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) asked a court on Wednesday for an injunction to prevent five former employees from using Bear Stearns' client lists in their new jobs at other banks. The request for an injunction comes as Bear Stearns struggles to hang onto clients after a run on the bank forced it earlier this month to agree to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase for a fraction of its prior market value. Bear Stearns asked the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan to force the former employees to return client lists or...

Central banks' efforts to ease strains in the money markets are failing to stop financial institutions from hoarding cash, stoking fears that the recent respite in equity markets may not signal the end of the credit crisis. Banks' borrowing costs - a sign of their willingness to lend to each other - in the US, eurozone and the UK rose again even after the Federal Reserve's unprecedented activity in lending to retail and investment banks against weaker than usual collateral and similar action in Europe. The continued friction in the money markets came even as stock markets were showing new...

What do you call it when the stock of the country’s fifth-largest investment bank trades at $50 on a Thursday and at $3 the following Monday? It’s been called the most dramatic fallout from the credit crisis, an epic stock analysts’ whiff, and one of Wall Street’s greatest collapses. All true. But I call it something else. I call it a bottom. Not just for the stock itself, which happens to be the venerable Bear Stearns, but for the whole stock market, and for the long-suffering housing market, too.

New York City risks losing 20,000 finance jobs Mon Mar 24, 2008 4:38pm EDT By Joan Gralla NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City risks losing more than 20,000 jobs in the high-paying financial sector over the next two years as the effect of the crisis in mortgage markets drives down Wall Street's profits, according to a report issued on Monday. The city's Independent Budget Office, in its report, estimated that Wall Street's profits for 2007 will sink by more than 80 percent to the lowest level since 1994. Profits for 2007 are expected to total just $3.2 billion, down...

"European bankers and the dollar holocaust" OK, this article isn't finished yet, but I was thinking like "why not publish what I've written so far beforehand, the topic is a highly important one and people here on Free Republic aren't whiners, sure they'll forgive me for saving this draft for later forum abuse and instead I could go treat my sore European intellect to some Absolut and b-movies". I'm on holiday, actually. The unfinished article (please comment!!): "Personally, I'm not born of banking stock. My forebears here in Sweden (yes, I am, again, trying to write an article in English...

No question, Bear Stearns Cos. evokes the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it. Politicians are already making analogies to Herbert Hoover, the demon of that period, and Franklin Roosevelt, the angel. On March 16, Senator Schumer of New York said on television: "We're in the most serious economic problem we've been in a very long time — much worse than 2001. The president's hands-off attitude is reminiscent of Herbert Hoover in 1929 and 1930." Within 24 hours, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat of Illinois, was weighing in with his own 1930s comparison. Roosevelt had pulled a...