The folks at Goldman, and Blankfein in particular, really do not get it. From Times Online: Goldman Sachs, the world’s richest investment bank, could be about to pay its chief executive a bumper bonus of up to $100 million in defiance of moves by President Obama to take action against such payouts. Bankers in Davos […]
Read more...Paul Volcker has an op-ed in the New York Times that made my stomach sink. I had considerable hopes for Volcker’s involvement in financial reform; he’s one of the few regulators with the stature (literally and figuratively) who can say things to bankers, the media, and government officials that are unpalatable yet need to be […]
Read more...Not that I have the time or patience to dig through 250,000 pages of documents, but I have a nagging suspicion that the people who are pouring through various AIG-related disclosures may be missing key points or snookered into interpretations that may be unduly flattering to various banksters. The focus of the recent investigations into […]
Read more...By Thomas Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive, and Yves Smith In September 2008, the Federal Reserve bailed out AIG, and ever since then, controversy has swirled around the motivation and terms of the bailout. A major part of the bailout funds went directly to three banks: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and the French […]
Read more...By Arthur Doyle, a former managing director of Lehman Brothers who now manages a hedge fund. I didn’t come to Joseph Tibman’s The Murder of Lehman Brothers expecting a blow-by-blow insider’s account of the financial meltdown of 2008. That ground has been covered adequately by, among others, Andrew Ross Sorkin in Too Big To Fail. […]
Read more...Reader Crocodile Chuck pointed out a set of articles at the New York Times that illustrates how skewed priorities in America have become. They also reveal how little public ire there is in the face of large-scale abuses that affect the average Joe. If corporate prerogatives cannot be reined in when personal safety is at […]
Read more...McClatchy has a breathless piece up on CDOs and other “exotic” transactions that Goldman did in the Caymans (hat tip reader John D). The problem is that the author got his hands on some very solid information (prospectuses of 40 deals) but the story itself is a bit of muddle. While it has some helpful […]
Read more...In support of Huffington Post’s call for people to move our money from the giant banks to community banks and credit unions: Here is a site which lets you find local credit unions Here is a site which rates the safety of banks, thrifts and credit unions And here is another site which rates the […]
Read more...Goldman is trying to diffuse the increasingly harsh light being turned on its dubious practices in the collateralized debt obligation market, with the wattage turned up considerably last week by a story in the New York Times that described how a synthetic CDO program called Abacus was the means by which Goldman famously went “net […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison As we head into the New Year, I am trying to look back at the last one with some semblance of a coherent interpretation of events that leads to a strategic vision of the future. I have already touched on stimulus, kleptocracy and crony capitalism as dominant themes for the year 2009. […]
Read more...By Washington’s Blog. Conventional wisdom is that the Internet is responsible for destroying the profits of traditional print media like newspapers. But Michael Moore and Sean Paul Kelley are blaming the demise of newspapers on simple greed. Michael Moore said in September: It’s not the Internet that has killed newspapers … Instead, he said, it’s […]
Read more...By George Washington of Washington’s Blog. As I have repeatedly noted, mainstream economists and financial advisors have been using faulty and unrealistic models for years. See this, this, this, this, this and this. And I have pointed out numerous times that economists and advisors have a financial incentive to use faulty models. For example, I […]
Read more...The latest WSJ/NBC News poll shows that President Obama’s approval rating has now slipped under 50%. This makes his the steepest first year decline in modern history. Why? You know what I would say: Obama doesn’t know when to be an asshole Obama wasted political capital on bank bailouts See what Aaron Task and Henry […]
Read more...Two leading White House economic advisors – Larry Summers and Christina Romer – are giving very different views on the economy. As Fox news summarizes: “Everybody agrees that the recession is over,” said Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council. “Of course not,” countered Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina Romer in a separate […]
Read more...Tall Paul is my hero. I would go further than he did in a speech in Sussex. The case can made that financial innovation of the OTC derivatives variety, which has mushroomed from 1992 onward, has been at best a wealth transfer device from the real economy to the financial economy, and has probably exacted […]
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