• The Bear Stearns bailout was the Fed's worst mistake in a generation, Vincent Reinhardt, former Fed director of monetary affairs, said last week.
• Jeffrey Sachs on the credit crisis, climate change and overpopulation.
• The Bank of England is long subprime!
• Doubting the Viability of Fannie Mae.
• The amount of cash available in bi-weekly auctions by the Fed and ECB will rise to $75bn and $25bn respectively.
• Doubts are mounting over a $4bn rescue bid for the US's biggest mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, after a deterioration in its stricken loan portfolio and a downgrade in its debt to junk status. S&P says an SEC filing by BofA creates uncertainty as to the ultimate legal status of Countrywide's creditors after the merger
• The capital value of the Threadneedle UK Money Securities fund has fallen virtually every month since the credit crunch first began last summer, in contrast to most other money market funds in the sector.
• A feud has erupted in the boardroom of Bear Stearns with directors trying to pin the blame on each other for the Wall Street firm's spectacular collapse. Bear's unofficial patriarch, its 80-year-old former boss Alan Greenberg, has accused the chairman Jimmy Cayne of ignoring warnings as the credit crunch began to bite last summer.

• UBS is cutting 5500 jobs, not the up to 8000 speculated previously.
• Did a senior UBS banker help American clients evade taxes?
• HSBC has opened its new North American headquarters in a 560,000 square-foot building in the Chicago suburb of Mettawa.
• Lloyds TSB insisted that it could ride out the credit crunch without seeking fresh cash from investors, despite suffering a near-£400m hit from the ongoing crisis.
• Morgan Stanley has announced the extension of its technology operations to Montreal with the establishment of a new center.
• Deutsche Bank has announced that it will triple its office capacity in Hong Kong by 2010 to meet its growth projections.
• HSBC and Lone Star have agreed to extend, until July 31, 2008, the deadline for completion of HSBC's proposed acquisition of 51.02% of Korea Exchange Bank, subject to regulatory approval.
• Commerzbank has reported a sharp drop in first-quarter profits as it feels the effect of the US sub-prime crisis. The German bank said profits for the three months to 31 March fell to 410m euros ($635m; £322m), down from 908m euros in the same period last year.
• Warren Buffett is considering mounting a multi-billion-pound bid for some of the most famous names in British insurance, including Direct Line and Churchill. The billionaire investor said that he has been poring over the books at Royal Bank of Scotland, which has put its portfolio of insurance businesses up for sale after running into financial difficulties during the credit crisis.
• With jobs harder to come by, bankers are behaving badly towards recruiters and headhunters, who are suddenly unable to slot them into comfortable new positions.
• Merrill Lynch is reportedly paying $50m to win the affections of former Goldman trading star Thomas Montag, who's joining as global head of sales and trading for the bank's debt and equities business.
• The American authorities have split up the so-called NatWest Three by ordering the British bankers to begin their prison sentences at separate jails in California, Texas and Pennsylvania.

Banks and Banking | Market Miscellany | International Markets | UK News | Credit Markets

• The Financial Services Authority intends to bring more criminal cases of insider dealing as a deterrent to rogue City traders. Such practices are thought to occur before a quarter of all merger announcements.
• A dollar invested in gold in 1801 would have grown to just $1.95 at the end of 2006.
• Quantnet.org interviews Dominic Connor, who teaches C++ in the CQF program, recruits for quant positions and also maintains the Quant Careers Blog over at Wilmott.com.
• Kirk's Reports: 1, 2 and 3.
• The current crop of financial gloom-and-doom books carry titles such as "America's Financial Apocalypse," "Financial Armageddon" and the comparatively prosaic "The Coming Economic Collapse."
• What is the difference between a Republican millionaire and a Democrat millionaire? Answer: a rosy outlook on the US economy.
• Wall Street has created a new generation of investments, called exchange-traded notes, or ETNs, which go by names such as BOXES, LUNARS, MITTS, PERQS and PISTONS. Except for the plainest of plain-vanilla ETNs, you should handle them like XPLOSIVs.
• Ask Ralph Wanger, the founder of Wanger Asset Management, about success, and he'll tell you about disaster.
• Humour: Word Problems for Future Hedge Fund Managers by Bob Woodiwiss
• Barclays Wealth has launched Commodity Select, a five-year investment linked to a diverse basket of commodities including energy, agriculture, base and precious metals.
• 'The Greatest Period for Private Equity Is Probably Ahead of Us' - Carlyle Group's David Rubenstein.
• What do hedge-fund manager Daniel Loeb, Citigroup creator Sandy Weill, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein have in common? They've all bought an apartment at 15 Central Park West - a new development in New York where, as Paul Goldberger puts it in the latest New Yorker, "the more spectacular units went for prices that would make even a movie star blanch"
• Despite the Credit Crunch, Private Equity Opportunities in Developed Markets Are Waiting.
• Following the Era of Large Buyouts, Private Equity Funds Find New Ways to Compete.
• Tea and Subprime Sympathy with Alan Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell at The Four Seasons in Washington, D.C. - Make a Bid.
• What is Yahoo (YHOO) actually worth per share, both today and 3-5 years from now?
• While mutual fund investors can get by with monitoring their portfolios on a quarterly basis, investors with a portfolio of individual stocks must constantly monitor portfolio movements. Web-based portfolio managers, also referred to as on-line portfolio trackers, can provide a means to easily record transactions and track performance.

• While China's manufacturing sector booms and people sock away money in savings accounts, the country's financial markets remain in their infancy, according to international finance experts who gathered at the recent 2008 Wharton China Business Conference.
• Crude oil may rise to between $150 and $200 a barrel within two years as growth in supply fails to keep pace with increased demand from developing nations.
• Hedging Against $200 Oil.
• Armani-clad investment bankers usually don't get much credit for saving the world. But the success of Europe's thriving market in trading carbon emission credits highlights a major area of innovation there - and a rare instance where making money and helping the planet go hand in hand.
• There has been outrage in Italy after the outgoing government published every Italian's declared earnings and tax contributions on the internet.
• Sovereign wealth funds grew to $3,500bn (£1,750bn) last year, putting them on track to surpass the entire economic output of the United States within seven years, according to a new study.
• The 100,000th Land Rover Freelander 2, recently rolled off the company's production line at Halewood on Merseyside. Its destination was the city of Surgut in the Siberian oil fields and the Rimini red 2.2 diesel is part of a flood of British-made luxury cars heading for the Russian market.
• Airbus has raised prices across its range of aircraft, blaming higher metals prices and the weakness of the US dollar.
• Rice prices have risen for the fourth consecutive day, as tight supplies are aggravated by the disaster in Burma's key rice-growing region.
• Why is Generation Y broke? And more on Generation Y finances: Young people, as they inherit the debts of their parents, must tell politicians they want long-term fiscal reform - not Fed Band-Aids.
• The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has warned that the crisis of rising food prices could reverse gains made in reducing poverty across the continent.

Banks and Banking | Market Miscellany | International Markets | UK News | Credit Markets

• The British economy is in severe danger of following the US into a recession and house prices could tumble by a third, David Blanchflower, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, warned last week.
• The future of financial regulation - Speech by Hector Sants, Chief Executive, FSA, Building Society Association Conference, 7 May 2008.
• Demand for London offices has fallen "significantly" in the first three months of 2008, according to property firm Savills.
• New research from moneysupermarket.com has revealed that over a quarter of Brits have only ever had one current account.
• Kensington and Chelsea has more estate agents for every resident than any other part of England and Wales - according to a report by Barclays - one for every 173 people who live there.
• A research conducted by Life Trust Insurance has revealed that people across the UK are massively underestimating how long they will live, and they are leaving themselves vulnerable to financial hardship at a time when they are most in need.
• The Woolwich, the mortgage lending arm of Barclays Bank, has become the latest big lender to demand at least a 10% deposit from all new borrowers.
• The head of one of the UK's biggest social housing associations has warned that the credit crunch is threatening the government's housing targets.
• A plan to build the world's largest wind farm in the Thames Estuary looks uncertain after Shell said it wants to pull out of the project. Shell wants to sell its stake in the London Array scheme and said it planned to focus on wind power in the US.
• The activities of fraudsters have changed owing to the effects of the credit crunch, says UK fraud prevention service Cifas. The group says that more people have been lying on application forms for loans and credit cards to try to cover up a poor credit history.
• House prices in the UK have recorded their first annual fall for 12 years, according to the Nationwide, and are dropping by almost £500 every week.
• Reservations of newbuild houses and flats have collapsed by two-thirds this spring due to the lack of mortgage availability, according to confidential industry data.
• Standard Life demonstrated the impact of the credit crunch last week when it had to bail out one of its money market funds at a £37m cost to its first half profits.