This blog has been falling down lately on its pledge to be America’s Leading Source of News About the Danish Economy™. I failed to link to Bryan Walsh’s excellent TIME article on Danish energy policy. I failed to bring to your attention an Economist story that ranks Denmark as one of the world’s top countries for entrepreneurs. I …

Reader Patricia Love e-mails:

I’m losing money hand over fist. I’m losing it in my 401k (each month, I have less than I had the month before–and that’s after my 15 percent contribution), I’m losing it in my IRA, and I’m losing it in my Roth (neither of these accounts has a huge balance, but I’ve lost about 35 percent of its value). The

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The Chinese-official-says-something-worrisome-about-the-dollar-or-Treasuries scare has by now become a pretty regular market phenomenon. What was new about Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s blunt words today were that they were blunter than usual, and that they were being spoken by Wen Jiabao, not a “high-level state economist” or “the …

For a long time—ever since the subprime mortgage market fell apart in 2007—people have been warning that credit cards were going to be “the next subprime.”

Well, there have been a whole lot of other next subprimes since then: non-subprime mortgage loans, investment banks, Scandinavian island nations (well, one Scandinavian island …

The early (internal) versions of that list of the 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis included Yale University chief investment officer David Swensen (it was Barbara’s brilliant idea). Not because Swensen’s a bad guy—by all accounts he’s a great guy, and a brilliant investor. But so many less-talented endowment and pension fund …

The NYT has a story today about banks that want to return the money they took from the Treasury Department’s TARP stash because “the conditions have become so onerous.” Reporter Stephen Labaton makes it sound like this is a problem. I see it more as a necessary corrective to the biggest flaw with the original round of capital injections …

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit says that “we are profitable through the first two months of 2009 and are having our best quarter-to-date performance since the third quarter of 2007.” This was in a pep-talky memo to employees, and we’ve all learned to be dubious of what banks claim are profits. But with the federal government throwing money …

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 way for the

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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 …

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 friend Roger Parloff took a valiant stab …

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 previous example was

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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 Dennis Dammerman,

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