The New York Times published an edited extract from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big Too Fail (man, that book is so large, they can release a ton in advance and still have a book and a half of reading left over). This section is on some of Dick Fuld’s efforts to save Lehman. The Japanese […]
Read more...Those who recall the early Clinton years may see some parallels to today, albeit in a watered-down form now. Clinton came into office, as political scientist/economist Tom Ferguson put it, “chanting one word as a mantra: ‘change.” He then appointed: an economic team that looked like Wall Street, a foreign policy team that resembled Jimmy […]
Read more...One of the horrorshows that has been moving along in the background is the disaster of the funding of a sewer project in Birmingham, Alabama, which looks pretty likely to produce the biggest municipal bankruptcy since Orange County back in the mid 1990s. Orange County did have one Robert Citron to blame for its woes. […]
Read more...Pay rules complicate GM CFO search: report Reuters. This sort of thing annoys me. Search firms have succeeded in getting companies to spec job searches very narrowly, so they can ONLY hire someone doing EXACTLY the same job at a VERY similar company. To induce said person to leave job, you need to pay a […]
Read more...Paul Krugman is back to his old form on the financial services beat, now that the cracks in the Paulson/Geithner/Bernanke “give the banks what they want now, in size, worry about cleanup later” strategy is proving to have been the wrong way to go. My big beef is that he didn’t go far enough and […]
Read more...Wolfgang Munchau has a solid, thoughtful piece at the Financial Times which argues that the widely applauded rallies in stock and commodity markets are already looking very much like bubbles, and the efforts to contend with them (either directly, or as a result of the need to start reining in liquidity) is likely to kick […]
Read more...Green spaces ‘improve health’ BBC. So people in Tokyo and Manhattan must not be very healthy. Swedes divided over bunny biofuel BBC. Eeew. Beware The Reverse Brain Drain To India And China TechCrunch. Um, this is news? Levitt and Dubner on the northern spotted owl Felix Salmon, Steven Dubner Digs the Hole Deeper Matthew Yglesias […]
Read more...Reader and life-long Chicago resident John Bougearel asked me to reissue a post encouraging readers to participate in peaceful demonstrations during the American Bankers Association annual meeting in Chicago October 25-27. The sessions are organized by a coalition of community, consumer and labor organizations and are called “Showdown in Chicago“. You can find more details […]
Read more...I was on the Andrew Hall/Phibro beat for a while and must confess I dropped it in the finish-the-book crunch. I neglected to follow up on and important aspect of the story that is still germane. Readers may recall the brouhaha: Hall, a high stakes oil trader, had received nearly $100 million in 2008 at […]
Read more...The “economy is recovering” story is not reflected in traffic at LA area ports (LA and Long Beach, which combined are the fifth largest in the world). The outlook for the shipping industry is even worse on the whole than for traffic volumes, since many carriers did not cut equipment orders. And while shipments are […]
Read more...Dolphin football off north coast BBC Major Arctic Ice Survey Finds a Significant Drop in Ice Thickness Yale environment360 In Praise of the Crack-Up Jeanette Winterson, Wall Street Journal New Report: Conservative Republicans Are Delusional Paranoids FireDogLake (hat tip reader John D). We need new terminology. Traditional conservatives will not doubt take offense at being […]
Read more...Actually, despite the somewhat churlish headline, the story “Bailout Helps Fuel a New Era of Wall Street Wealth,” by Graham Bowley at the New York Times, is a solid job of reporting and does not tiptoe around the issue of the big bennies that the financial services industry is enjoying and their role in creating outsized […]
Read more...Two good segments from an interview with Elizabeth Warren of the Congressional Oversight Panel (hat tip reader Scott) at Tech Ticker: Warren discusses how banks are winning, hands down, in getting the rules they want: Watch the video here. Key quote from her discussion of bonuses: “I do not understand how financial institutions could think […]
Read more...The economy must be better, because the rich are spending more. I have to wonder how much of the increase in spending is the result of direct benefit from financial services industry subsidies (ie, people working for large financial firms spending more because they are confident they will have a good to great bonus this […]
Read more...I’m of two minds about taking up this theme, since stating what ought to be obvious but is nevertheless unpleasant and inconvenient is apt to get one branded as lunatic fringe. Access journalism has created what is in many respects a controlled press. And that matters because people are far more suggestible than most of […]
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