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I know I shouldn’t beat this dead horse but I can’t help myself. Just this past Friday, when describing Andy Xie’s hopeful tone in sensing a change of the short-sighted and ruinous mindset that was driving policy makers in the U.S., I wrote:
I am glad he is hopeful that Obama sees the folly in more [...]

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This is the third in a series of posts about ideas for financial reform generated by the “Make Markets Be Markets” conference I attended yesterday in New York City on 3 Mar 2010. You can download all of the written presentations here.
A century ago, anyone with a bathtub and some chemicals could mix and sell [...]

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Apparently, some of the ‘best reforms’ now being instituted in the U.S. to prevent a liquidity crisis in the future include limitations on demand deposits (hat tip Karl Denninger). What financial institutions are trying to prevent is a bank run in whatever form it can take – via depositors in the case of IndyMac and [...]

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Last summer, I heard from a source close to the Obama Administration that the public option was mostly a bargaining tool and that the Obama Administration would only use it in order to pass healthcare reform. Translation: the Obama Administration never supported a public option. While the Obama Administration has never admitted as much, many [...]

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Here’s my take on a recent story of apparent plagiarism at the New York Times.  Some are probably conjuring up memories of Jayson Blair.  However, I see something different, namely a battle regarding the credibility of independent financial blogs like mine as a news source.
The fact is most American newspapers and television stations are owned [...]

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A while back I wrote a post called A populist interpretation of the latest Boom-Bust cycle that used a passage from Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel on kleptocracy as a jumping-off point for a larger discussion about wealth distribution. The overall gist was that almost all societies have unequal distributions of income [...]

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This comes from Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review:
Whatever Tim Geithner’s New York Fed was trying to hide in the AIG backdoor bailout was so volatile it was deemed worthy of national-security-like classification, and the Fed reacted to media FOIA requests for information by withholding more information.
Reuters, gets the scoop on emails that detail [...]

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Earlier in the week, I wrote a post-mortem on the Massachusetts Senate race won by Scott Brown. I saw the results as a signal that Americans are worn out by fraud and corruption. I found one comment from a registered Democrat particularly instructive regarding the mood of the electorate and am publishing the heart of [...]

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The Democratic defeat in yesterday’s Massachusetts Senate race puts a punctuation mark on the grinding erosion of support for the Obama Administration and its economic policy in a tough first year. Clearly voters were sending the Administration a message that America is on the wrong course with Obama’s poll numbers slipping below 50% by December [...]

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Reuters reporter Matthew Goldstein has this breaking story:
It could take until November 2018 to get the full story behind the U.S. bailout of insurance giant American International Group because of an action taken last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In May, the SEC approved a request by AIG to keep secret an exhibit to [...]