One of the big questions that one hopes investigators will dig up an answer for over the next few weeks was when Bernie Madoff’s investment strategy made the switch from legitimate to Ponzi scheme. It seems highly improbable that he meant for it to be a scam from the beginning. There just wasn’t anything in it for him. He was already a …
Wall Street & Markets
Hanging with Bernard Madoff (it wasn’t memorable)
I spent some time with alleged mega-scammer Bernard Madoff last fall. And ever since I got the WSJ news alert e-mail Thursday afternoon about his arrest, I’ve been thinking I should write something about my experiences. My problem has been that I can barely remember them. Madoff was kind of a cipher: Nice enough guy, seemed reasonably …
Is German (and Japanese and Chinese) frugality the problem?
Martin Wolf writes in today’s FT:
What are Germany’s characteristics? It has an overwhelmingly competitive manufacturing sector; it is a chronic surplus country, with structurally weak domestic demand (ameliorated briefly during unification); and it has managed to avoid any housing or domestic credit booms. Its elite appears
…
The stock market’s 1930s-style behavior
Barbara’s post last week about the spectacular (and historic) proliferation of days in which the S&P 500 has moved 5% or more this year raised a couple of questions. The data she cited just went back to 1950, so one question was, how does this year’s volatility compare with that of the 1930s? Another was, why the heck is it happening? …
The Detroit Three move to the House
I’m watching the House Financial Services Committee hearing on the auto bailout, but I’m not going to give it the extensive treatment that I gave to yesterday’s Senate hearing. The House hearings are almost never as good as the Senate ones anyway, and I’ve got other stuff to do. I will write something later about the drama in …
The auto hearings, part deux
The CEOs of the Detroit Three have successfully navigated the roads between Michigan and Washington, D.C., in their hybrid vehicles, and arrived at the hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. UAW chief Ron Gettelfinger is there too, but I’m assuming he was sensible enough to fly Northwest. It’s their second try at pleading …
The Wall Street amnesty program: Just give back the money
In Thursday’s FT, John Gapper does a very nice job of threading the needle on The Great Bob Rubin Question:
Mr Rubin needs to find a way to make up for his part in Citi’s downfall. My suggestion is that, in addition to giving up his bonus for this year and last, he returns, or gives to a good cause, the bonuses he got in 2005 and 2006,
…
GM wants some G-men to play the heavies
General Motors has submitted its 37-page “Restructuring Plan for Long-Term Viability” (a.k.a. request for an $18 billion bailout) to Congress. There’s still a lot of defensive hey-we’re-already-totally-competitive-so-just-lay-off stuff in it (16-17 pages worth, I’d say), and of course a lot fuel-efficiency-is-job-one stuff to appease the …
The Detroit Three’s slow trip back to Washington
Alan Mullaly will be driving in a Ford Escape hybrid. Rick Wagoner will travel in a Chevy Malibu hybrid. Bob Nardelli hasn’t figured out how he’ll get there yet, but taking a private jet is out of the question. It’s not quite carpooling in a minivan, as I suggested they do a couple weeks ago, but it’s close enough.
It’s mostly silly …
Are Citigroup’s troubles evidence that Glass-Steagall repeal was a colossal mistake?
Having made the argument a couple of months back that repealing the Glass-Steagall Act was a good thing because it allowed J.P. Morgan Chase to buy Bear Stearns and Bank of America to (maybe) buy Merrill Lynch, I’ve been feeling a little guilty about not having revisited it yet in light of Citigroup’s troubles. So here goes:
It was the …
Mark Cuban not so ha ha ha
I’ve been getting a steady stream of traffic over the past couple of days to a post I wrote in May 2007 titled Ha ha ha Mark Cuban ha ha ha. It was about the Warriors’ glorious upset of Cuban’s Mavs in the NBA playoffs that year. The people landing there now all presumably want to read about Cuban’s insider trading mess, and I feel bad …
Next time they should probably carpool
So the Detroit bailout will have to wait, at least until December. Nancy Pelosi said it was because lawmakers wanted to see a plan for how GM, Chrysler and Ford would spend the money. Then there was that other reason:
[W]hatever support they found sagged when it became known that each of them had flown into Washington aboard
…