“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
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
Is the Fed Repeating Wall Street’s Sins? Joe Nocera: At a certain point, Wall Street ran out of clients to sell [securitized debt] to. So the only way it could keep the machine going was to buy it themselves. Jon Stewart: So, they infected themselves. At the end, they themselves became vampires. [Which suggests] a...Read More
“We ALL Caused This Mess??” Hardly. Put me in the camp that says, without an accurate diagnosis, it’s not possible to cure our current economic mess. So, here are two competing narratives explaining how we got to this juncture, both courtesy of Les Leopold (thanks to Ned Krahl for forwarding the Leopold piece): Narrative #1:...Read More
SEC vs. Goldman Sachs Confused about why the SEC sued Goldman Sachs for fraud, and what it means? Here’s about as succinct a summary as I’ve seen, from the inimitable Michael Lewis: Just as there was a time when people could smoke on airplanes, or drive drunk without guilt, there was a time when a...Read More
A Cut for Everyone But the Taxpayer “Bribe” (verb): to induce or influence by or as if by bribery. “Bribe” (noun): money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust. –Webster’s Dictionary Of course, the whole thing is that “no laws were...Read More
