R.I.P., “Tall Paul” [Editor’s Note: The post below originally ran more than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash (Oct. 20, 2009 to be exact). My sentiments about former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who died yesterday at age 92, are exactly the same today.] I don’t have many heroes, political or...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
Opting for Swedish over Japanese Tired of my rants against Wall Street? Consider this “guest” rant instead, which IMHO is pitch-perfect (minus a few #!%#!, perhaps): After 40 years of pain avoidance, can we just rip off the f**kin’ band-aid already? Enough with the asset price protection, it is the root cause of everything bad about...Read More
Ben Bernanke, Flame-Thrower In an ideal world, investors would allocate capital to the stock market because the potential returns were attractive. Not because The Federal Reserve had obliterated all the alternatives. Yes, the Fed’s announcement that it would keep interest rates at zero through 2013 arrested the markets’ free fall (and has the added, noxious...Read More
Looking for the New Volcker’s Regular readers of this blog know that I could hardly be a harsher critic of modern-day Wall Street: its practices; its obscene pay for little or no economic contribution (“Wall Street is Worthless“); and its corrupting influence on our government and society generally. And I’ve got plenty of company. As...Read More
“Don’t Just Stand There — Buy Something!” Some people wait for a new episode of a favorite TV series (Seinfeld, The Sopranos). Others for a new album from a favorite artist. I look forward to Jeremy Grantham’s latest quarterly newsletter. Seriously. The man’s honest, brilliantly insightful — and a great writer, to boot: Greenspan was...Read More
