Crime and No Punishment “The Jungle,” by Upton Sinclair. “Silent Spring,” by Rachel Carson. “Unsafe at Any Speed,” by Ralph Nader. To this illustrious list of muckraking, epoch-changing books, add one more: Charles Ferguson’s “Predator Nation.” Pantheon of Greats Essentially the unabridged companion piece to his 2010 Oscar-winning documentary (“Inside Job“), the book is a sober if...Read More
That’s One Way to Put It According to “Why Nations Fail,” a book cited by Tom Friedman in his New York Times column today, egalitarian institutions are the key to successful nations, “extractive economic and political institutions” lead to failed ones. I have no issue with the authors’ observations and conclusions — after all, they’re Tenured...Read More
Wall Street Allocating Capital . . . to Itself Once upon a time, Wall Street’s reason for being (“raison d’etre,” if you want a fancy term) was to efficiently allocate capital from suppliers of capital (aka “savers”) to those who could most productively use it — typically young, promising companies. At least, that’s how I...Read More
If the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury were coordinating the response to the cruise ship disaster off the coast of Italy, here’s what they would be doing: –the Captain and senior officers would all be given multi-million dollar bonuses (actually, their regular, annual multi-million dollar bonuses). –Carnival Cruises, the ship’s owner, would transfer title to the...Read More
Safety in Numbers? If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem. –John Paul Getty If a small investor gets ripped off by Wall Street, they’re SOL. But if a whole lot of investors get ripped off by Wall Street, there’s at least the...Read More
Adding Fuel to the Fire — Then Buying Fire Insurance According to Margin Call — the most recent movie to tackle the Wall Street-authored financial bust — the honchos running the nation’s biggest investment banks realized too late that the market for mortgage-backed securities was going to collapse. So, literally overnight, they did a 180, dumping their...Read More
