Forgot to post this Friday: I’ve got a column in the new issue of TIME about some reasons not be entirely pessimistic about the economy. Because I wrote it as a list, the dot-com folks have of course turned it into a gallery so you have click again and again and again and again and [...]
I wrote Friday about some ways to extract a pound of flesh from those who got spectacularly rich doing things that helped bring on the current financial mess. Matt Miller did me one better. He asked former shareholder lawsuit terror Bill Lerach, currently in prison in Arizona, for advice. And Lerach delivered: [T]here is a [...]
Myron Scholes, whose Black-Scholes option pricing model provided the intellectual underpinning for modern derivatives markets, thinks one particular derivatives market—that for credit default swaps—is due for a Red Adair style rescue. Or a Fred Adair style rescue. Red Adair put out oil well fires by setting off gigantic explosions at the wellhead. “My belief is [...]
I’ve updated my wildly popular chart of the decline in payroll employment with the nasty new numbers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics released this morning. TIME.com graphics czar Feilding Cage is out, so I made the chart myself, which explains why it’s uglier than usual: The months listed on the right are when payroll [...]
In a comment to my rambling attempt to explain the mess that is AIG, curmudgeon57 asked: At what point can we hold the board and officers criminally liable for running a scam? (if you sell something you can’t deliver, you either have to return the money or go to jail. It’s that simple, right?) My [...]
Some fun (well, maybe that’s the wrong word) facts from Rob Arnott: 1. As of today, this is now the second-biggest six-month decline in US stock market history. The only bigger six-month drop was barely larger, 51% in the crash of 1932. If tomorrow is a repeat of today, we’re in new territory. Fortunately, that [...]
Yeah, you read the gloomy media reports yesterday about the Fed’s latest “Beige Book” report. But you won’t really know what the Beige Book is about until you’ve read Gilbert Cruz’s Skimmer of it for TIME.com. My favorite part: 1. On the laid-back nature of laid-off New England retail employees: “Retailers continue to manage inventory [...]
Yesterday the Treasury Department released the specifics about how mortgage servicers are to be coaxed into rewriting loan terms to keep struggling borrowers in their homes. This, as you may recall, is one part of the government new three-pronged housing crisis fix. (The other two are letting some underwater borrowers refinance and using Fannie Mae [...]
I did an interview yesterday with Lisa Mullins at Public Radio International’s The World on which countries are suffering most from the meltdown. It was on short notice, so I was sort of making stuff up as I went, but the producer (an old friend) seems to have edited out my most obviously clueless statements. [...]
Way back in 1997, I wrote these words in a Fortune article: General Electric, a company whose name invariably comes up when you ask Wall Streeters about earnings management, says it does what it does because the stock market demands it. “We think consistency of earnings and no surprises is very important for us,” says [...]
