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 …

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 …

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 …

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

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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? …