My latest column is online and in the issue of TIME with half a Star of David and some barbed wire on the cover. It begins.
We are in the midst of a cleanup of toxic financial waste that will cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, at the very least. The primary manufacturers of these hazardous products pocketed
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In what strikes me as a pretty major change of heart, Citigroup has signed on to Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin’s effort to give bankruptcy judges the power to rewrite the terms of mortgages. Reports the WSJ:
The cramdown bill would apply to all mortgage loans, including but not limited to subprime loans, written any time prior to the
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My old friend Bethany McLean, who was writing about Fannie Mae when writing about Fannie Mae wasn’t cool (so was I, but far more superficially), has an epic dissection of “Fannie Mae’s Last Stand” in the February Vanity Fair. It tries in places to be a typical personality-driven VF story, with former CEOs Jim Johnson and Frank Raines as …
A reader asks, with regard to my post about S&P 500 volatility through the years:
According to the Stock Trader’s Almanac one gets the impression that there was a year end rally in 1929, 1930, 1931 and 1932. Would it have been a profitable trade to own the S&P500 during these years for the period from December to March?
Well, here are …
The suspicious folks at Westlaw’s Legal Currents ask:
With the Madoff Securities $50 billion Ponzi scheme touching so many investors, we at Westlaw Business remain shocked. Not for the reason everyone else is, though – our shock derives from the seeming insulation of U.S. financial institutions and operating businesses from all this.
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Here’s the video of my interview last week with Hank Paulson. (Don’t worry, it’s not the whole interview. Just five minutes worth.)
Karen Tumulty points me toward some depressing comments from President Bush this morning:
I was in the Roosevelt Room and Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson, after a month of every weekend where they’re calling, saying, we got to do this for AIG, or this for Fannie and Freddie, came in and said, the financial markets are completely
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1. Build a time machine.
2. Go back to January 1, 2008, and buy shares of Emergent BioSolutions.
It might ring a little odd, what with markets down about 40% for the year, but there actually are stocks that have had a very good 2008. I wrote a piece for Time.com about some of them. Click here to read it.
All told, 263 stocks were …
I, like lots of other people, have been reading through the pile of documents about Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme that Harry Markopolos submitted to the SEC in November 2005. The WSJ describes them as “ranging from in-depth mathematical calculations that purported to show the Madoff investment strategy couldn’t work, to little more than …
Probably not, but it’s an interesting thought:
We argue in this paper that if agents correctly believe in the possibility of a partial bailout when a gigantic Ponzi scheme collapses, and they recognize that a bailout is tantamount to a redistribution of wealth from non-participants to participants, it may be rational for agents to
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A reader who has been through the experience of having tons of money and then suddenly not having it anymore writes:
I decided to think of the people who lost money in the Madoff scam differently today. At first, I had a vision of old family “blue blooders” who find every tax loophole to keep and make a dime being the real losers here.
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Bernard Madoff appears to have operated a Ponzi scheme, in which money from new investors was used to pay off those who got in earlier. But there are other, perfectly legitimate financial endeavors that share this same basic model.
The most obvious is Social Security (and James Pethokoukis has already nominated Madoff for Social …
