Wall Street & Markets

Here’s my new column. And, just to give you the readers of the Curious Capitalist some added value, I have reproduced the column I originally wrote, then tore up because I didn’t like it, after the break. I’m currently sitting in a semi-comfy chair at the Santa Clara Marriott, which is right across the street from a roller coaster. In a …

I’m currently a couple doors down from the house where I grew up in Lafayette, Calif., mooching off the neighbors’ wifi (thanks, Roger and Jeane!). And I’m trying to figure out what I think about the House of Representatives voting 328 to 93 today to impose that 90% tax on bonuses paid out by companies getting government bailouts.

My …

My TIME colleague Massimo Calabresi reports that:

Though Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Congressional leaders Tuesday he only learned of the impending $160 million bonus payments to members of AIG’s troubled financial products unit March 10, sources tell TIME that the New York Federal Reserve informed Treasury staff that

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I had the curious experience this morning of finishing a column and being deeply dissatisfied with it, then reading a Steve Randy Waldman post that inspired me to go back and fix it. And now I’m reasonably happy with the column. I can’t show it to you yet (and it’s always possible my editors will hate it), but I can link to Waldman’s …

BusinessWeek‘s Michael Mandel asks the big question: Should We Have Saved Lehman and Let AIG Fail?

These folks at AIG are turning out to be annoying and amateurs to boot, in the deepest sense. It looks like they were just playing out of their league, and they signed bad contracts. I would rather have bet on Lehman.

I heard the same thing …

This blog has been falling down lately on its pledge to be America’s Leading Source of News About the Danish Economy™. I failed to link to Bryan Walsh’s excellent TIME article on Danish energy policy. I failed to bring to your attention an Economist story that ranks Denmark as one of the world’s top countries for entrepreneurs. I …

Reader Patricia Love e-mails:

I’m losing money hand over fist. I’m losing it in my 401k (each month, I have less than I had the month before–and that’s after my 15 percent contribution), I’m losing it in my IRA, and I’m losing it in my Roth (neither of these accounts has a huge balance, but I’ve lost about 35 percent of its value). The

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The Chinese-official-says-something-worrisome-about-the-dollar-or-Treasuries scare has by now become a pretty regular market phenomenon. What was new about Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s blunt words today were that they were blunter than usual, and that they were being spoken by Wen Jiabao, not a “high-level state economist” or “the …

For a long time—ever since the subprime mortgage market fell apart in 2007—people have been warning that credit cards were going to be “the next subprime.”

Well, there have been a whole lot of other next subprimes since then: non-subprime mortgage loans, investment banks, Scandinavian island nations (well, one Scandinavian island …

The early (internal) versions of that list of the 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis included Yale University chief investment officer David Swensen (it was Barbara’s brilliant idea). Not because Swensen’s a bad guy—by all accounts he’s a great guy, and a brilliant investor. But so many less-talented endowment and pension fund …

The NYT has a story today about banks that want to return the money they took from the Treasury Department’s TARP stash because “the conditions have become so onerous.” Reporter Stephen Labaton makes it sound like this is a problem. I see it more as a necessary corrective to the biggest flaw with the original round of capital injections …