As readers may know, a recent post, “Frontline’s Astonishing Whitewash of the Crisis,”discussed the first half of the Frontline series, “Money, Power & Wall Street.” Producers Mike Wiser and Martin Smith sent a letter taking issue with this review, and I made an exception to my usual practice and posted their missive.
The major dispute is over whether their series lets the financial services industry off too lightly.
Read more...strong>Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
To know the Washington Consensus as a regular citizen is to hate the Consensus.
Read more...I received this e-mail last week. I will issue my rebuttal Tuesday during the day. Check back in then!
Read more...Adam Davidson is moving up in the world. He has gone from fellating the 1% to the top 0.1%.
Read more...I got a message from a regular reader:
Read more...Several of my savviest readers wrote expressing disappointment and consternation with the Frontline series on the crisis, “Money, Power, and Wall Street.” The first two parts of the four part series have been released, and it’s probably safe to say that this program is far enough along to be beyond redemption.
Read more...In his role as the Lord Haw-Haw of yawning income disparity, Adam Davidson reports on the world of elite nannies in his latest New York Times piece, “The Best Nanny Money Can Buy.” Child caregivers perceived to be good enough for the superrich (which means they might need to possess other skills, like speaking Mandarin, cooking restaurnt-level meals, being able to ride and groom horses or sailing) make big bucks!
Read more...Paul Starobin has a useful article at Columbia Journalism Review on the way some high profile journalists receive large speaking fees for appearing before financial services industry audiences, most often conferences for investors, when they write about the same industry.
Read more...As Winston Churchill pointed out, history is written by the victors. The big end of finance, having won decisively in the global financial crisis, is in the process of rewriting history to suit its liking. The cover story in the current Atlantic by Roger Lowenstein on Ben Bernanke, titled simply, “The Hero,” is a classic example of this type of revisionist history.
Read more...Even though the odds are against the Democrats retaking the House of Representatives, the jockeying in case that event takes place is already underway. An effort is afoot to push aside the Democratic heir presumptive of the powerful House Financial Services leadership, Maxine Waters, and install the representative from the Upper East Side’s Silk Stocking district, Carolyn Maloney.
What’s striking about the effort to take down Waters is the thinly disguised racism.
Read more...I ducked out of the Atlantic Economy Summit to see Lauren Lyster of RT TV. We talked about the hot story of the day, the New York Times op-ed by departing Goldman executive director Greg Smith that decried what he saw as a deterioration in the firm’s values over his 12 year career.
Read more...By Richard Smith, spelunker of the Web. We started Robert Cowley’s web bio here and this is the second installment. We will be in Mayfair, London, or on the Gold Coast of Australia, and the story involves a dead Daily Mail journalist, a great racing driver, and a bad racing driver: a very bad one, […]
Read more...Just when you think things have gotten as bad as they can, whether in matters of great import of small, they manage to get worse. I should be inured to relentless Obama propagandizing by now, but to make sure the public doesn’t miss the fact that they are lucky enough to be governed by someone possessed of true genius, the pre-election PR is now taking on heavy-handed cult of personality overtones. As if Obama has enough in the way of personality for anyone to notice.
Read more...By Richard Smith, proud scion of a 5,000-year-old line of soot-smeared metal bashers, (purportedly). An early version of this post was born prematurely, and then, since blogging is more forgiving than obstetrics, hurriedly stuffed back into the womb by the flustered midwife. This is the fully developed version.
Robert Cowley, aka Earl Cowley, aka 2nd Baron Ardwhallan, aka Sir Robert Cowley, aka the Right Honorable Robert Cowley, is a faker, fantasist, social climber, fraudster and con man from Australia.
I suppose I could stop there, but it wouldn’t be much of a biography, and Cowley has such a shadowy and fantastical pedigree that it would be a shame not to record some of it: the traces he leaves aren’t always durable, but they are always vivid while they last.
Read more...By Richard Smith, who is easily distracted.
I promised in my last meander, about international scammers and media screwups, that my next post was going to be set in Australia. But I found this little gem, while looking for something else, and so the exotic locations this time are Colombia and Vancouver (the big Canadian Vancouver, not the little Vancouver in Washington, US, which, as it happens, might also get a look-in in a future post in this rambling series).
But this one is still about scammers and media screwups, so we are still on track, sort of. Here’s BBC World Business giving Rahim Jivraj an opportunity to puff his pump-and-dump Colombian mining company, Mercer Gold.
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