Congress is supposed to start its review of the SEC today, January 5.
In the spirit of inquiry, we’re wondering—only half jokingly—had Mr. Madoff admitted only to losing vast sums of money in September, would the government have provided bailout money to him?
Why not? At the point regulators had investigated his firm eight times over 16 years, and […]
Higher Pay for Congressmen and Greatly Reduced Staff Staph Levels
This past weekend—the last before Christmas—we saw a few reports criticizing the upcoming Congressional pay raises, including this one at FoxNews: Pay Raises for Lawmakers Anger Watchdog Groups.
In that article, someone from a watchdog group noted that “Members of Congress don’t deserve one additional dime of taxpayer money…”
We’ll leave the […]
It Doesn’t Add Up.
According to The Wall Street Journal, today S&P Cut Ratings on 11 Banks.
Depending upon each institution’s accounting policies, individuals at those firms may have cheered their firm’s respective downgrade because that action may have reduce the value of the firm’s outstanding debt thereby allowing the firm to recognize an unrealized gain on its income statement. (Yeah, it is […]
Back on May Day, when oil was about $120 per barrel, we speculated in Commodity Bubbles? Yeah, Probably, that the price could be $40 per barrel by year end. (We weren’t very specific about which kind of oil and when it was to be delivered, but such is life.)
We don’t keep track of all of our […]
We very much like the ancient Greek story of Cassandra, and one could well imagine that for almost ten years, Harry Markopolos felt like a modern-day Cassandra.
We don’t know enough about Mr. Markopolos to know whether he wrote letters to the SEC about hundreds of other fund managers claiming that they also ran Ponzi schemes or were part of […]
In the thirty-five years since the first “energy crisis,” have Chrysler, Ford, or GM avoided a single management fad?
Have their collective managements through the years embraced of any single fad that led to sustainable improvements anywhere?
Now, it is true that many fads—and we are using that word pejoratively—contain useful recommendations and are consistent with effective and efficient management. However, […]
Daniel Henninger has an interesting column in The Wall Street Journal today. It is entitled America Needs Its Frontier Spirit.
Although we don’t entirely agree with it, we do like his sentence: “The great danger now is that a depressed and angry people will allow the risk-taking American baby to be thrown out with the toxic-securities bathwater.”
Perhaps he should […]
The Wall Street Journal reports today that Obama Keeps His Distance From Treasury on TARP. It seems the Mr. Obama and his representatives are not providing the Bush administration officials with specifics about their mortgage and liquidity crises-related plans.
We say: what’s wrong with that?
Whether Mr. Obama and his staff are seriously deliberating and contemplating specific plans or actions or […]
Music for Our Times
The turbulence in the financial markets shows no sign of ending. Commodities buyers, including food companies and airlines, suffer large losses from ”hedging” programs as prices plummet. “Hedge” funds suffer losses that are exacerbated by the high leverage applied during calmer days; redemptions are limited. Industries and unions beg for our tax dollars. State governments beg for our other […]
If you haven’t read it, For the Vix, 40 Looks Like It’s the New 20 in today’s The Wall Street Journal please know that is a decent column.
We particularly like the paragraph:
“Volatility may not return to its highs, but it isn’t clear when it will get back to normal, either. Volatility breeds fear, which breeds more volatility. There […]
We concluded last Wednesday’s Thanksgiving post with:
So among the many things that we are thankful for this year, we do thank God that we live in a country where we can freely and harshly criticize our elected and appointed officials. That is not the case in much of the world: whether measured by population or land mass. (So we […]
The Curious Case of Robert Rubin
The weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal has a front page interview with Robert Rubin: Rubin, Under Fire, Defends His Role at Citi.
We’ve criticized Citi’s board in the (recent) past, and we’re still particularly fixated on the fact that few directors had financial industry experience. That seems neither wise nor even prudent for a financial […]
That’s a title we never thought that we would write, but before we chase away our regular readers who share our political and economic world-view, please let us explain: it’s not as bad as it looks.
In Kimberly Strassel’s WSJ column, Hillary of State, Ms. Strassel describes how the mainstream media have now returned to providing a favorable […]
This post greatly expands upon a comment we made about regulation in Even A Perfect Bailout Will Fail and possibly elsewhere.
Regulators as wise monkeys.
Today’s The Wall Street Journal has an article entitled, Bank Examiners Are Told to Step Up Sanctions on Lenders.
The first sentence of the article says it all: “The U.S. government’s armies of bank examiners have been ordered to […]
The Wall Street Journal today, November 28, reports Rescue Plan Strained by Lack of Staff.
We’ve criticized the government’s response to both the domestic mortgage crisis and the larger global confidence crisis since it—that which became TARP—was first proposed. (We use the singular “it” because we’ve not heard any government official decouple the problems either in their […]
