I’ve got the Senate Banking Committee hearing about the Bear Stearns deal on in the background. Life’s too short to liveblog it. But Chris Dodd’s attempt to get somebody to admit that the Fed had ordered that the original sale price be just $2 elicited some interesting responses.

Treasury Undersecretary Robert Steel said that, “There …

Bond market kingpin Bill Gross’s monthly screed is out, and as usual it’s got lots of interesting insights and lots of passages that don’t entirely make sense. Anyway, this may be my favorite part:

I’ve had a famous picture of J.P. Morgan on my office wall for 25 years. Even now, the old man seems to be staring at my back and taunting

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A very nice analogy from one Chris Cook:

The subject of “peak oil” is usually misrepresented to mean “oil is running out” but in fact means that, “while there may be plenty of oil in the ground, there is a maximum (peak) level of production which we may even have reached”. Peak oil has gradually evolved from a wild “crank” theory to the

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There’s been lots of talk lately about fixing Wall Street pay so people don’t get rewarded so lavishly for taking crazy risks that blow up later. And there have been some pretty convincing explanations of why that will never work.

But now, in a comment to this very blog, Curious Capitalist regular and Wall Street veteran That Anonymous …

A fun fact from Fun Floyd Norris:

During 2006 and 2007, Lehman spent $5.3 billion — a lot more than it is now raising — repurchasing shares at an average price of almost $72 per share. The shareholders who sold out did well. Those who held on were the losers.

When Lehman repurchased shares that made the number of shares outstanding …

I wrote this more than a year ago, and it strikes me that it’s more timely now than it was then. So in the interest of self-aggrandizement, I’m recycling it (with some minor tweaking):

A little while back, in the august pages of Foreign Affairs, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby offered a rousing defense of hedge funds. It …

PBS is airing a two-part documentary starting tonight (what time? check your local listings) called Retirement Revolution, and I’m in it. I’m pretty sure I’m not in tonight’s episode, though it’s possible that just I missed myself while fast-forwarding through the podcast. But that doesn’t make it any less edifying.

The show is a pretty …

You read it here first. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard now reports in the Telegraph (via Across the Curve) that the Federal Reserve thinks the Swedes (and Norwegians and Finns) might have something to teach us about financial bailouts:

A senior official at one of the Scandinavian central banks told The Daily Telegraph that Fed strategists had

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As I write this, Hank Paulson is finally giving his big speech on regulatory reform. But the great wave of reaction has been going on for a couple of days now. There are seven stories on the Paulson plan in today’s WSJ alone.

My quick read of all the reactions is that Wall Street mostly likes the Paulson approach, while lots of …

Hank Paulson is going to make a speech Monday about what our financial regulatory system ought to look like. But the WSJ, NYT, WaPo, and LAT already have all the details. (Not a word yet in the FT, interestingly enough.)

This latest of several “Paulson plans” (the full “executive summary” is here) is not directly a response to the …

So, long after Ana got to it on Swampland, I’ve finally read Barack Obama’s big financial regulation speech. His basic diagnosis of the problem is this:

A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business has changed. But by the time the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999, the $300

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