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Joe Nocera

Michigan Senator Carl Levin: a Hero (or Two) Amongst the Scoundrels

“The Senate’s Muckraker” Against a backdrop of epic Wall Street corruption and captured regulators — just look at the resumes of the top 20 SEC officials, starting with Mary Jo White, nominated by Barack Obama to lead the agency — it’s easy to forget that there also good guys out there. Former Senator Ted Kaufman,...
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Apprising Jon Corzine

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...
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Corollary to “Too-Big-to-Fail”: Too Small to Lend To

To Financial Giants, Everything is a “Micro-Loan” Three years ago, the federal government used tens of billions in taxpayer dollars to save the banking system. Now, at this dire economic moment, the country needs the banks to return the favor. –Joe Nocera, “Mr. Banker, Can You Spare a Dime?”; The New York Times (9/10/2011) It’s...
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Confusing Predator, Prey

This Weekend’s Hot Story While it’s still free, check out this article in The New York Times:  ‘In Prison for Taking a Liar Loan.’ It recounts the utterly fantastic tale of a how a small-time Countrywide borrower came to serve a 21 month sentence for mortgage fraud, while the bank’s senior executives literally walked away with...
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"Quantitative Easing??" Try, "Printing More Idiots"

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...
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Roosevelt-Lite

“Making Bankers Mad” The Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself . . . Firms will have to put up a little more capital, and deal with a little more oversight, but once the financial crisis...
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