I’m certain you’re familiar with the expression “death wish.” I am beginning to wonder whether America has a banana republic wish. The country has been taking steps towards being a small-minded, elite-dominated, sham democracy. Mind you, I am pointing to a tendency, not an established fact. The US isn’t Haiti, or even Argentina. But we […]
Read more...Oddly, this story, which runs in today’s Financial Times, does not seem to have been reported in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times (and perhaps not on Bloomberg either, but I am less certain since its search tools for the great unwashed aren’t foolproof). The findings, at least for the Fed, are […]
Read more...This is four years too late, but for those readers (particularly those outside the US) who wonder how Americans were conned into believing going into Iraq was warranted and desirable, watch this video (or read the transcript). The Bush Administration disinformation wouldn’t have worked if the press had exhibited any backbone. This documentary goes through […]
Read more...The Financial Times, in a series of articles published today, probes the workings of the carbon trading business, and uncovers widespread fraud: buyers paying for reductions that don’t occur, organizations extracting large carbon reduction payments for programs they were going to implement regardless, clueless or complicit brokers, offset programs that are shams. We have been […]
Read more...Calculated Risk has a great post today, “‘Bailouts for UnterNerds: The Freddie Mac Story,” that says, in essence, that the “bailout” or “stabilization” for subprime mortgages announced by Freddie Mac today is much less significant and much less helpful to borrowers than it might seem. Freddie Mac stated that it will be purchase $20 billion […]
Read more...The Financial Times reports today on a report prepared by 11 retired US admirals and generals on the security implications of global warming. The authors concluded that global warming would worsen regional conflicts, worsen living standards, and undermine stability. These findings are consistent with earlier reports that discussed the large-scale dislocation that would result from […]
Read more...You seldom hear language like this from anyone in the deal community, particularly a borrower. But Steve Rattner, head of Quadrangle Partners, sees himself as not just your average LBO maven, but also a thoughtful Democrat (he was expected to get a post in a Kerry administration). But also notice that his comments in a […]
Read more...We have yet another instance of the Journal putting a happier face on the news than the Financial Times, this time on the slowly escalating US-China trade dispute. By way of background, we reported earlier on the US’s imposition of punitive duties on Chinese, Indonesian, and South Korean coated paper because these countries were determined […]
Read more...Is the Wall Street Journal averse to bad news? That may seem a bizarre question to ask about any news organization, since by definition, most news is bad news. But we’ve noted before that the Journal has seemed particularly loath to pick up on certain stories that were covered aggressively in the Financial Times, such […]
Read more...I don’t know how to characterize the state of the media in the US. A controlled press? Self-censorship? Whatever the cause, the result is that important stories are so often watered down that the kid-gloves treatment comes perilously close to misreporting. This isn’t news to any close reader of the US press. But it is […]
Read more...Sorry for the number of posts from the Financial Times today, but it happens to have stories no one else is carrying (yet). The FT tells us today that the EU has ordered Microsoft to hand over what the company calls “sensitive and valuable technical information about its Windows operating system for next to no […]
Read more...The summary of the second report is due out this Friday. Oddly, this sneak preview appears, at least so far, only in the Financial Times (I checked the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times). As described below, the second report delves deeper into the nature and scope of likely changes, and how they […]
Read more...Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had a story, “Economy Can Withstand More Mortgage Foreclosures,” which said, About 1.1 million foreclosures are likely to result from jumps in monthly payments on adjustable-rate home-mortgage loans made in 2004 through 2006, according to a study by First American CoreLogic. Christopher Cagan, director of research at the real-estate-information concern […]
Read more...Yesterday, we had a link and some commentary on a front-page New York Times article, “Crisis Looms in Mortgages,” by Gretchen Morgenson. Morgenson likes a take-no-prisoners style of writing, and she tends to be controversial due to her forceful articles about CEO pay. I will confess to having read past it (I am inured to […]
Read more...Um, because Barney Frank is making their case? This great post from Dean Baker at Beat the Press makes a simple and persuasive argument: Representative Barney Frank has proposed a law that would require corporations to have non-binding polls of their shareholders on CEO compensation packages. According to Marketplace Radio, the opponents of this measure […]
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