The Obama administration is actively discussing the creation of a regulatory commission that would have broad authority to protect consumers who use financial products as varied as mortgages, credit cards and mutual funds, according to several sources familiar with the matter.
Hmmm, this sounds awfully …
I’ve got an essay up on CNNMoney.com, which will eventually find its way into the paper pages of Fortune. It begins:
There was a time (the 1990s, to be precise) when the concept of shareholder value made a bit of sense: Corporations focused on keeping shareholders happy, and their stock prices rose through the roof.
Things haven’t
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Thanks to Ezra Klein’s brand new blog at washingtonpost.com, I just discovered a 10-day-old post by Jim Surowiecki that puts some meat on the bones of an argument that’s been bouncing around my head for a while. We’ve all heard lots and lots about how zombie banks supposedly doomed Japan to a lost decade of semi-depression, which means …
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This is a (much-abridged) video of my interview for TIME’s 10 Questions with CNBC’s Jim Cramer. And here’s the print version. I know some of you deeply disapprove of him. And I admit that it’s a weirdly constrained interview, given that my job was simply to ask questions posed by TIME.com …
This was just forwarded to me by former Curious Capitalist guest blogger Mark Gimein:
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — An economist on leave from the federal agency that insures bank deposits has been charged with the April 11 attempted robbery of a Kansas City-area bank.
Jeff Walser said he had a bomb in his briefcase and demanded money at the
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I tend to get around to listening to podcasts long after they were recorded (other than the all-important Deutsche Welle Nachrichten podcasts, which have the advantage of being only 5 minutes long), so it was only on this morning’s subway ride to work that I got to last week’s semi-notorious Planet Money shouting match between Harvard …
The FT hosted a breakfast this morning where Gillian Tett promoted her new book about derivatives and the financial crisis, Fool’s Gold. There was a great moment during the Q&A when NYT columnist Joe Nocera started off, “There’s this character in your book, Mark Brickell …”
“He’s sitting behind you,” Tett interrupted. At which point …
The Washington Post has a fascinating tale today of student-loan behemoth Sallie Mae throwing in the towel—and abandoning its long-time frenemies in the banking industry—by more or less endorsing the Obama administration’s plan to put student lending in the hands of government. Sallie Mae’s tweak to the administration plan involves …
That’s me, chomping on a bull’s head after interviewing Jim Cramer today for next week’s 10 Questions. Apart from when he’s talking about how mean Jon Stewart was, Cramer is really compelling (in a rambling, totally neurotic sort of way). He didn’t yell or say “booyah,” but he did let me push all the noise buttons to the left of his …
They’re out! And available for download! And what do the long-awaited stress tests from America’s banking regulators tell us? Well, first of all, that American Express, BB&T, Bank of New York Mellon, Capital One, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, MetLife, State Street and U.S. Bancorp all get to go about their business without having to …
The Treasury Department will finally be releasing the already endlessly leaked, contemplated and criticized stress tests in a few hours. After that we will be subjected to another confusing month or so of watching the banks deemed to be in need of more capital find ways to meet regulators’ demands. Much of this, it appears, will involve …
Yesterday it was the ADP employment estimate and the Challenger layoff numbers. Today, weekly unemployment claims. I’ll take it from Ian Sheperdson of High Frequency Economics, who had been extremely suspicious of earlier signs of a turn in the data:
Jobless claims fell 34K to 601K, well below the consensus 635K and the lowest reading
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