The top West Coast regulator of the Office of Thrift Supervision has been removed from his job while the Treasury Department’s inspector general looks into some weirdness surrounding backdated capital infusions into since-failed thrift IndyMac. Add that to the demise of the biggest savings institution regulated by OTS, Washington Mutual, …
The protectionism comeback and a possible solution
The lead story on the front page of the Washington Post today warns that trade barriers are making a comeback:
Moving to shield battered domestic manufacturers from foreign imports, Indonesia is slapping restrictions on at least 500 products this month, demanding special licenses and new fees on imports. Russia is hiking tariffs on
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Killing off the 401(k), one CSPAN call-in program at a time
I’m going to be on CSPAN Monday morning from 8 to 8:30, talking about the “Should the 401(k) Be Killed?” column I wrote a few weeks back. So this seems like a good time to go through some of the e-mail I got in response. Most of it was disapproving, as were the letters to the editor. A sampling from my inbox:
Your statement that 401(k)
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Fodder for conversation at the holiday dinner table
Next week is supposed to be a slow one here at Time, so I won’t be popping up on the Curious Capitalist super-often. Let me leave you with something to toss into the conversation when your family starts talking about the economy. No matter which winter solstice celebration you observe, I’m guessing it’s going to come up at dinner.
Since …
Were U.S. banks really smart enough to avoid Madoff?
The suspicious folks at Westlaw’s Legal Currents ask:
With the Madoff Securities $50 billion Ponzi scheme touching so many investors, we at Westlaw Business remain shocked. Not for the reason everyone else is, though – our shock derives from the seeming insulation of U.S. financial institutions and operating businesses from all this.
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The people behind the Bernie Madoff video were had, too
The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination, the charming little Upper East Side institution that hosted the panel discussion with Bernie Madoff that I moderated (normally their events are more interesting, like this Saturday’s show-and-tell with Bela Fleck), videotaped it, and put the video online so all …
The auto bailout: Treading water until the new guy takes over
The $17.4 billion auto bailout package that President Bush announced this morning is a stopgap measure intended to keep GM and Chrysler alive until the Obama administration and the new Congress can figure out what to do about them. This is exactly what the Democratic congressional leadership wanted to have happen and it’s about the best …
The Paulson interview
Here’s the video of my interview last week with Hank Paulson. (Don’t worry, it’s not the whole interview. Just five minutes worth.)
President Bush wanted to avoid a depression greater than the Great Depression
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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Someone at Credit Suisse has a wicked sense of humor
It really is a thing of beauty (via Bloomberg):
Credit Suisse Group AG’s investment bank has found a new way to reduce the risk of losses from about $5 billion of its most illiquid loans and bonds: using them to pay employees’ year-end bonuses.
The bank will use leveraged loans and commercial mortgage- backed debt, some of the
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How to make 376% in the stock market
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 …
Harry Markopolos really did have the goods on Bernie Madoff
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 …