The indispensable Epicurean Dealmaker—whom I would surely hire if (a) I were in need of an investment banker and (2) I could figure out who he is—makes a rare defense of his kind:
I stick by my assertion that we did not create the huge global demand for riskless returns that is at the root of our current predicament. Investment
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The announcement this morning (pdf!) by Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman Gary Gensler that his agency is considering imposing limits on the size of trades by energy futures speculators may amount to something of a landmark (or turning point, or whatever portentous phrase you prefer) in Washington’s relationship to financial …
The John Carney-Barry Ritholtz debate on whether the Community Reinvestment Act caused the financial crisis has a strangely retro feel to it. It’s just so … 2008. It started with Clusterstock’s Carney explaining, in a long, thoughtful post, why he had changed his mind about the 1977 law meant to bring more bank lending to poor and …
Bernard Madoff got his sentence this morning. It’s 150 years in prison, which is a bit longer than your average 71-year-old can be expected to live. (Curious Capitalist Jr. was actually wondering about this yesterday—what if, he asked, Madoff got sentenced to 150 years but doctors discovered new life-extending techniques in coming …
Bloomberg’s Yalman Onaran has a long look at the role Paul Volcker is playing in the Obama Administration (via Ritholtz). It’s apparently bigger than it was a few months ago:
After the inauguration and Geithner’s confirmation, Volcker was elbowed aside, White House insiders say. His economic recovery board took weeks to get off the
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Here’s a piece I wrote for TIME.com about the Fed’s indecisive monetary policy decision yesterday. Here’s a post I wrote for the TPM Cafe Book Club discussion of Edmund Andrews’s Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. And finally, here’s some thrilling CNBC action from this morning:
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Australian executive Rob Ferguson sends me a link to an appreciation he’s written of Peter Bernstein. Which reminds me that I don’t think I ever linked here to the brief obit I wrote for TIME. The story Ferguson tells is classic Bernstein—an executive at Bankers Trust (head of its Australian operation), Ferguson had called Bernstein …
I’m sitting here trying to figure out my column for this week—it’s about financial regulation, but I haven’t gotten much further than that. And yeah, I’m still Googling pretty regularly to see what kind of chatter is going on out there about my book. Which is how I happened to come across this brand-new column by Robert Teitelman, …
The WSJ and Washington Post both appear to have gotten their hands on the Administration’s financial regulation “white paper” (the Post even has a pdf of it). I’ll write more on the subject tomorrow, but a couple of thoughts for now.
First, the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency seems like a big deal, and a good idea. It is also, …
Gillian Tett writes in the FT:
For the past five decades, the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute has been teaching the tenets of analysis based on efficient markets to tens of thousands of adherents from banks, fund managers and investment houses that make up the global financial system.
Now, however, the credit crisis has forced
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The Treasury Secretary actually uttered the words “be cautious” while discussing his approach to interpreting economic and financial data, but it also seems to be something of a personal credo. In a half-hour long chat this morning with my boss, Rick Stengel, as part of something called Conversations on the Circle (the circle being …
