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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In one sense the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision today to move its intended Federal Funds rate down to “a target range … of 0 to 1/4 percent” was historic—never, since it began announcing the target rate in the early 1980s, has the Fed gone below 1%. But it’s also something of a nonevent: the actual Federal Funds rate has …
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 …
I’ve already written about my Bernie Madoff panel-moderating experience, but now that other people are posting an abridged YouTube video of the event (with contributions from Madoff and his employee Josh Stampfli, plus a few of my questions), I figure I’d better do the same:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auSfaavHDXQ]
A friend …
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 …
I’ve done a lot of bashing here of those who think the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act separating banking from the investment business is to blame for all our troubles. I’ve also argued that securitization—at least fancy-pants securitization—has been partly at fault. So it was interesting to hear an economist I admire make the …
It was pretty clear last Thursday when the Detroit Three CEOs testified before the Senate Banking Committee that a lot of Senators (among them committee Chairman Chris Dodd and ranking Republican Dick Shelby) were interested in punting the auto bailout to the Bush administration or the Federal Reserve. Now they’ve gotten their way, and …
My new column is online and in the issue of TIME with a bunch of lists on the cover. It begins:
It was only on the first of December that we finally got formal permission–from the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)–to call what the U.S. economy is experiencing a recession. Just a few days
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In a hugely encouraging development, The New Republic reports that the Obama transition team hopes to avoid using the word “czar” in the coming administration. I’ve already had my say on this czarophilia, so I’ll let Kevin Drum, who tipped me off to this important news, get his two cents in:
Where did this whole czar business come from,
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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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Why exactly is that, every time we put a government official in charge of some big, less-than-well-defined task, he or she becomes a czar? (Car czar, drug czar, energy czar, cybersecurity czar, there must be more.) I get why Führer and duce aren’t gonna work. But there are lots of other options: emperor, king, queen, prince, archduke, …
