I’ve got an article up on TIME.com about “secular bear markets” and Graham and Buffett and stuff. It will hold no surprises for those versed in value-investor lore. But, in a sad commentary on our times, I’m told that many readers of the Internets are not versed in value-investor lore. The basic message is that [...]

Commenter Linda S, who has an exasperating habit of asking questions that I don’t really know the answers to, asks regarding credit default swaps: I … have read articles that suggest that these swaps not only give people an incentive to drive a company into bankruptcy but that it provides a huge incentive to make [...]

When I worked at Fortune I used to go down to Washington to talk to Alan Greenspan about once a year. I wasn’t really trying to report on what the Fed was up to, so the conversations could range all over the place. I remember one very clearly in which Greenspan stated his opinions on [...]

A reader writes: I’ve asked brokers, finance wizards and total strangers to explain what the stock market does. Yes, I understand that when a business issues new shares, it gets capitalized. And when a business folds, shareholders get the (ha ha) liquidation dividend. I also acknowledge that there needs to be some sort of vehicle [...]

The calm and and less-painful-than-expected conclusion of the big auction of Lehman Brothers’ credit default swaps has led to some talk that maybe the role of CDSes (CDSs? CDS?) in bringing on our current financial near-debacle has been wildly overblown. Making the case perhaps even more strongly is Ben Stein’s Yahoo column from last Friday, [...]

I’ve been meaning for a while to put a plug in here for Arnold Kling, who has delivered some of the most consistently provocative commentary on the financial freakout over the past couple of months. Much of Kling’s appeal has to with his possibly unique-on-this-planet combination of knowledge, experience and attitude. He’s a product of [...]

For several years now, a few smart people–Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach is the first to spring to mind, but there were others–have been arguing that the Federal Reserve ought to do more to rein in the creation of asset price bubbles. Alan Greenspan, after making a tentative attempt at bubble management with his famous “irrational [...]

When last I checked, the Official Financial Indicator of the Panic of ’08, the TED spread, had dropped below 3. The TED spread measures the gap in interest rates between three-month T bills and three-month LIBOR, and it hasn’t closed below 3 since Sept. 26. Of course, it was in the 1 to 1.1 range [...]

The call came Saturday evening before dinner. Curious Capitalist Jr. (who is 9) picked up. The caller asked to speak to a grownup. He handed the phone to Mrs. Curious Capitalist. Mrs. CC sat there answering questions for a while. From the answers, they seemed like very strange questions. After a while CC Jr. came [...]