When Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company last year, he finagled a way to make the employees themselves big owners—if the newspaper-and-TV outfit ever made a profit, that ownership structure would help with the tax bill. The news of Tribune filing for bankruptcy protection therefore made me a tad queasy. I had an Enron/WorldCom my-whole-401(k)-is-in-company-stock [...]
The big question looming over the push to rewrite the home loans of people struggling to make payments is whether or not such mortgage modifications keep folks in their houses for the long term. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a danger that loan modifications, at least the way they’re currently done, don’t solve the problem, [...]
Barbara’s post last week about the spectacular (and historic) proliferation of days in which the S&P 500 has moved 5% or more this year raised a couple of questions. The data she cited just went back to 1950, so one question was, how does this year’s volatility compare with that of the 1930s? Another was, [...]
