At a private equity conference this week, Drew Bowden, a senior SEC official, told private equity fund managers and their investors in considerable detail about how the agency had found widespread stealing and other serious infractions in its audits of private equity firms.
Read more...Remarkably, some Goldman alumni look about to re-enact Enron-style energy market price manipulation all along the East Coast. And no one appears to be alert enough to stop them.
Read more...Net neutrality is on its way to being executed by the likes of Comcast and Verizon. That will mean the death of the Internet as we know it.
Read more...Are Silicon Valley and DealBook so desperate that they cannot find an honest CEO to revere?
Read more...Yves here. This post is important, not simply for chronicling health care corruption, but also in demonstrating how, just as in financial services, the individuals responsible are not targeted for fines or prosecution.
Read more...Conservative economists love “creative destruction.” They can’t wait to “get their Schumpeter on” when a business fails and thousands of workers lose their jobs.
There is no more “creative destruction” conceivable than when we put a bank that has become a fraudulent enterprise into receivership, remove the controlling officers leading the fraud, and sell the bank through an FDIC-assisted acquisition
Read more...I’m a little surprised at the overly coded reporting at the New York Times and particularly the Wall Street Journal, where Nick Timiraos provides top-notch coverage on the mortgage beat, on the implications of the failure of a widely-touted, Administration-backed GSE reform bill to get out of the Senate Banking Committee. Basically, it confirms what I’ve long believed but refrained from writing about, namely, that government sponsored enterprise, aka, GSE reform, was not going to get done in this session of Congress.
Read more...Every day brings multiple new scandals. At least they used to be scandals. Now they’re simply news items strained of ethical content by business journalists who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak not about evil.
Read more...At this point, it seems hard to add insult to injury, given the terrible track record of the OCC Independent Foreclosure Reviews. But it’s nevertheless been done.
Read more...A lot of people are misreading this Princeton study on the political influence of the wealthy and business groups versus ordinary citizens. The study does not say that the US is an oligarchy, wherein the wealthy control politics with an iron fist.
Read more...How the junk food industry tries to get its way with young children in India.
Read more...Paul Ryan’s austerity budget is demonstrably failed economic policy in a new bottle.
Read more...If kleptocracy is a disease, Tunisia is in Stage 4. Its ruling family that controlled an impressive swathe of the economy. But what is sobering about the Tunisian case study is that an overthrow of the government has done little to reverse the concentration of wealth and power. Is that because Tunisia was so far gone, or is this native to kleptocracy, that once it becomes established, it is difficult to extirpate?
Read more...Yves here. Although I like this piece, I believe Joe is not cynical enough about MSNBC, which has become a messaging apparatus of the Democratic party. The reason that MSNBC is now talking about inequality is Obama is pushing for a minimum wage increase, so wealth and income disparity are no longer verboten topics
Read more...We’ve argued that the notion that companies are obligated to maximize shareholder value is a theory made up by economists and eagerly adopted by corporate executives, with little to no foundation in law. We received confirmation of our thesis in the form of a Columbia Law Review article by the chief justice in Delaware, Leo Strine, arguing that shareholder activism needs to be curbed. As if CEOs are really breaking a sweat over those pesky shareholders.
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