Adding Fuel to the Fire — Then Buying Fire Insurance According to Margin Call — the most recent movie to tackle the Wall Street-authored financial bust — the honchos running the nation’s biggest investment banks realized too late that the market for mortgage-backed securities was going to collapse. So, literally overnight, they did a 180, dumping their...Read More
“A River Runs Through It” Nature, to be controlled, must be obeyed. –Francis Bacon You wouldn’t necessarily know it from the sound bite-driven Presidential race, but one of the fundamental questions at stake in the 2012 election is, ‘exactly how free should markets be?’ Continuum At one extreme, Libertarians like Ron Paul say “completely.” They...Read More
What Happens When Artificially Low Interest Rates . . . . . Rise? Does “financial repression” have a better ring to it than “market manipulation?” If so, you’ll like this piece from today’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page: However well-intentioned, the Federal Reserve’s continued purchase of long-term Treasury securities risks camouflaging the country’s true cost of...Read More
“Pot Calling the Kettle Black” — Updated “God is dead.” –Nietzsche “Nietzsche is dead.” –God In a nutshell, that’s my reaction to the news that Standard & Poor’s has put a majority of the Eurozone countries on alert for a credit ratings downgrade. That would be the same S&P that took payment from Wall Street to...Read More
Wall Street Journal: ‘Blame the Regulators’ Chutz-pah′: killing your parents, then throwing yourself on the mercy of the court because you’re an orphan. So, according to The Wall Street Journal, who’s to blame for the still-missing $1 billion of client funds at now-bankrupt MF Global? Not the company’s senior management, led by CEO Jon Corzine,...Read More
It Also Makes a Great Helicopter Landing Pad If you had a 100,000 square foot rooftop in the shadow of Twin Cities International airport, you’d do it, too: paint a huge company logo on top of the building, that is. So, the first thing I noticed taking off for AZ this afternoon was the huge...Read More
