As the Senate continues debating financial-industry reform this week, I’d like to re-iterate a point I first made in a Time.com article: lots of businessmen are in favor of a sweeping overhaul. You wouldn’t necessarily know that from reading the headlines, since headlines tend to capture the highest profile lobbying—like what comes from the U.S. Chamber [...]
Things keep getting worse for Goldman Sachs. Late yesterday news broke that federal prosecutors are looking into whether to bring criminal fraud charges against the Wall Street firm. (The outstanding SEC lawsuit involves only civil charges.) No word yet on any details about what those new charges may entail. Nonetheless, stock analysts are already downgrading [...]
As the Senate takes up debate on financial industry overhaul, there is one issue above all others that is imperative to work out: how to deal with institutions that are Too Big To Fail. The reason the government stepped in with taxpayer money at firms like Citigroup and AIG is still alive and well. Our financial giants [...]
Last month a software engineer at Apple accidentally left his iPhone in a bar. A fellow patron picked up the phone and asked the people in the bar around him if it belonged to any of them. It didn’t. He took the phone home and the next day noticed that the phone looked odd. He jimmied open its [...]
Today’s Goldman Sachs hearing in the Senate is fantastic theater. The kind of theater that makes you want to run to the restroom to vomit. I’ve been watching the hearing on TV, and I am nauseated to report that they still don’t get it. The world came to the brink of financial ruin, and the [...]
Today’s WSJ op-ed page has a curious defense of keeping more-complex derivatives off exchanges. It goes like this: when someone (like John Paulson) takes a short position on a derivative (like a synthetic CDO), that’s really important information for the market to have since it signifies John Paulson’s opinion that the thing tied to the [...]
Today President Obama gives a speech on financial re-regulation in New York City—a.k.a., the city he and Congress are out to hurt with financial re-regulation. Okay, I exaggerate. Although as my colleague Michael Scherer pointed out yesterday, if financial reform is done right, Wall Street banks will see profits decline, at least in the short [...]
Good news in the WSJ this morning: mortgage delinquencies are on the decline. According to LPS Applied Analytics, the number of loans that were at least 30 days past due or in foreclosure declined by 8.6% in March. That’s the second month in a row we’ve seen a drop. The president of LPS, which does [...]
