I’m sitting again in the jury selection room of the main state civil court building in downtown Manhattan, while in the federal court building next door Bernie Madoff has just pleaded guilty to all manner of horrific deeds (worst among them of course mail fraud). There were a bunch of TV crews on the steps [...]
The early (internal) versions of that list of the 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis included Yale University chief investment officer David Swensen (it was Barbara’s brilliant idea). Not because Swensen’s a bad guy—by all accounts he’s a great guy, and a brilliant investor. But so many less-talented endowment and pension fund managers [...]
One day of jury duty down. I ended up spending hours and hours in a small jury selection room with 29 of my fellow New Yorkers as we were quizzed about whether we could fairly adjudicate (do jurors adjudicate?) a civil case involving a woman who slipped and fell in a Manhattan office building. I [...]
Yesterday afternoon I wrote a quick piece for Time.com about the great day the stock market had. Here it is. The gist: The stock price of the beleaguered financial giant Citigroup jumped 38% today, to a whopping $1.45 per share. Shares are now down only 93% from a year ago. That sort of context might [...]
The NYT has a story today about banks that want to return the money they took from the Treasury Department’s TARP stash because “the conditions have become so onerous.” Reporter Stephen Labaton makes it sound like this is a problem. I see it more as a necessary corrective to the biggest flaw with the original [...]
I’m reporting for jury duty (the civil division of the New York Supreme Court, which is what they call the main trial court here) this morning. They’ve got wifi in the jury assembly room, so I may actually end up doing more blogging than I have over the past couple of days (been struggling with [...]
I can’t get CNBC’s video site to work on my office computer, but I’m pretty sure this is a video of me talking to Erin Burnett and Mark Haines this morning about my “Call Me Mr. Sunshine” column. The best moment was near the end when Haines, sounding exasperated, said something along the lines of, [...]
Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit says that “we are profitable through the first two months of 2009 and are having our best quarter-to-date performance since the third quarter of 2007.” This was in a pep-talky memo to employees, and we’ve all learned to be dubious of what banks claim are profits. But with the federal government [...]
Nonprofit RealBenefits realized its software could help more people only if it got greedier
FDIC chairman Sheila Bair doesn’t think a full government takeover of Citigroup and other multinational financial institutions is practical or even possible. Here are her reasons, as summarized by Pete Davis: 1. The legal authority to take over large banks does not currently extend to multinational financial conglomerates; 2. The FDIC lacks the funding to [...]
