I’m reporting for jury duty (the civil division of the New York Supreme Court, which is what they call the main trial court here) this morning. They’ve got wifi in the jury assembly room, so I may actually end up doing more blogging than I have over the past couple of days (been struggling with a hard-to-write column). If I don’t, that …
Me on CNBC: Really, it’s okay not to spend more than you earn
I can’t get CNBC’s video site to work on my office computer, but I’m pretty sure this is a video of me talking to Erin Burnett and Mark Haines this morning about my “Call Me Mr. Sunshine” column. The best moment was near the end when Haines, sounding exasperated, said something along the lines of, “We can’t have the sort of booming …
Extra! Extra! Citigroup may be profitable!
Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit says that “we are profitable through the first two months of 2009 and are having our best quarter-to-date performance since the third quarter of 2007.” This was in a pep-talky memo to employees, and we’ve all learned to be dubious of what banks claim are profits. But with the federal government throwing money …
Selling Out to Growth
Nonprofit RealBenefits realized its software could help more people only if it got greedier
How much of Citigroup could the FDIC actually take over?
FDIC chairman Sheila Bair doesn’t think a full government takeover of Citigroup and other multinational financial institutions is practical or even possible. Here are her reasons, as summarized by Pete Davis:
1. The legal authority to take over large banks does not currently extend to multinational financial conglomerates;
2. The FDIC
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New column: Call me Mr. Sunshine
Forgot to post this Friday: I’ve got a column in the new issue of TIME about some reasons not be entirely pessimistic about the economy. Because I wrote it as a list, the dot-com folks have of course turned it into a gallery so you have click again and again and again and again and again. Sorry. Think of all the hassle you would save if …
Making the financial miscreants pay, Bill Lerach edition
I wrote Friday about some ways to extract a pound of flesh from those who got spectacularly rich doing things that helped bring on the current financial mess. Matt Miller did me one better. He asked former shareholder lawsuit terror Bill Lerach, currently in prison in Arizona, for advice. And Lerach delivered:
[T]here is a way for the
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Myron Scholes, intellectual godfather of the credit default swap, says blow ’em all up
Myron Scholes, whose Black-Scholes option pricing model provided the intellectual underpinning for modern derivatives markets, thinks one particular derivatives market—that for credit default swaps—is due for a Red Adair style rescue. Or a Fred Adair style rescue.
Red Adair put out oil well fires by setting off gigantic explosions …
Employment decline now worse than in 1981-82 recession
I’ve updated my wildly popular chart of the decline in payroll employment with the nasty new numbers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics released this morning. TIME.com graphics czar Feilding Cage is out, so I made the chart myself, which explains why it’s uglier than usual:
The months listed on the right are when payroll employment …
Making the financial miscreants pay (it’s harder than you might think)
In a comment to my rambling attempt to explain the mess that is AIG, curmudgeon57 asked:
At what point can we hold the board and officers criminally liable for running a scam? (if you sell something you can’t deliver, you either have to return the money or go to jail. It’s that simple, right?)
My friend Roger Parloff took a valiant stab …
The stock market’s historically bad run
Some fun (well, maybe that’s the wrong word) facts from Rob Arnott:
1. As of today, this is now the second-biggest six-month decline in US stock market history. The only bigger six-month drop was barely larger, 51% in the crash of 1932. If tomorrow is a repeat of today, we’re in new territory. Fortunately, that previous example was
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Best Beige Book coverage ever
Yeah, you read the gloomy media reports yesterday about the Fed’s latest “Beige Book” report. But you won’t really know what the Beige Book is about until you’ve read Gilbert Cruz’s Skimmer of it for TIME.com. My favorite part:
1. On the laid-back nature of laid-off New England retail employees: “Retailers continue to manage inventory
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