links for 2010-05-04

Real consumption is far outpacing real compensation – an unsustainable divergence.

European Central Bank President Jean- Claude Trichet, who capitulated on a January pledge not to relax lending rules for the sake of one country, may have to sacrifice more principles to prevent Greece from bringing down the euro.

Without the government backed entities there would be almost no mortgage market. We are a long way from normal …

Evidence released Tuesday by Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat in charge of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, includes a series of e-mail messages sent by executives at Goldman Sachs as the bank attempted to shed mortgage-related assets in the run-up to the subprime crisis of 2007. The e-mails appear to support one of the most important criticisms of the bank — that it served itself at the expense of its clients — and illustrate the conflicts of interest that arise when banks’ proprietary trading overlaps with customer sales.