Exec Comp 2012: One CEO Equals . . . Everyone in Cleveland?!? In 1989, the chief executives of the seven biggest banks in the country made about 100 times the income of the typical American household, on average. On the eve of the crisis in 2007, they made more than 500 times the median. –Eduardo...Read More
“What Would TR Do?” “It’s too soon to tell.” –Mao Tse Tung’s response, when asked (in 1947) about the consequences of the French Revolution. Just as perspective is needed to appreciate signal historical events, so, too, is distance required to assess great individuals. More than a century after Teddy Roosevelt successfully challenged the monopolists and concentrated financial...Read More
“Occupy Wall Street” Conundrum: What to Occupy One of my favorite political cartoons — from the 1970’s no less — shows a self-satisfied oil executive sitting behind a big desk, his feet up, smoking a cigar (I said it was from the ’70’s). “You want oil?,” he practically cackles (to no one in particular). “We own the wells.”...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
The “RoboCop Solution” to the Financial Crisis When it comes to holding the citizenry hostage, owners of pro baseball and football franchises have nothing on Wall Street. The former, of course, have refined to an art form the practice of extorting tax dollars from cities and counties to build ever more expensive (and grandiose) sports palaces. The pitch?...Read More
