Wall Street’s Machiavellian Sharks Perhaps it’s uncharitable to complain about the piddling $12 million severance Jon Corzine was poised to gain if he had managed to sell his current firm, MF Global Holdings, over the weekend. But I’m going to complain anyway. The idea that Corzine, who single-handedly destroyed MF Global Holdings, was in a position to...Read More
No Longer AWOL on Financial Reform Notwithstanding a very long public record of Wall Street self-dealing, treachery, and greed on a scale never before witnessed in American (world?) history, New York Times columnist (and St. Louis Park native) Tom Friedman has been silent on the need for systemic financial and political reform. Until today. Our Congress...Read More
Straight Talk on the Financial Crisis. Finally. “By now it is pretty clear that it was faith in the techniques of modern finance, stoked in part by the apparent huge financial rewards, that enabled the extremes of leverage, the economic imbalances and the pretenses of the credit rating agencies to persist so long.” Quick, which...Read More
“If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing, Papa’s Gonna Buy You a Diamond Ring” You can scarcely pick up (OK, click on) an Op-Ed page these days without encountering the latest housing remedy du jour. Today’s proposal is courtesy of Alan Blinder, Princeton professor and former Federal Reserve official: As nationalized companies that dominate the mortgage market,...Read More
“The odds of finding yourself behind a slow-poke driver on a single-lane, no-passing-road vary proportionately with how pressed you are for time.” –Murphy’s Law of the Road (or at least, my version) “The odds of said driver having exactly the same destination as you — thereby maximizing the amount of time you’re stuck behind them —...Read More
Class Size: Millions Annual cost to go to Stanford (tuition, room & board, books): 1980: $15k 2011: $60k 2020: free?? Once upon a time (like when I was 18), a year at Stanford was expensive but still affordable. So, someone from a middle class, Minnesota family (mine) could swing it with a little financial aid and some...Read More
