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Below is a very good video of John Bogle, the legendary investor, at Columbia Business School, hosted by CBS Professor David Beim. In his speech, Bogle places much of the blame for the present crisis with the increasingly hostile corporate governance environment of the last quarter-century, a point I make in my recent post “The [...]

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A friend passed me a URL now which led me to a few posts over at Bronte Capital and at Felix Salmon’s blog at Reuters about a firm connected to the Biden family called Ponta Negra. T here may be a connection here to the alleged Stanford fraud.
I have done and probably will not do [...]

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Over the past few days, I have written two posts regarding the increasingly acrimonious sparring surrounding Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

The horrible self-dealing of Ken Lewis and the principal-agent problem
BofA CEO Lewis investigated by SEC
BofA saga continues as John Thain calls Lewis a liar

The latest news is stunning: Bank of America’s MAC [...]

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The Wall Street Journal is running a front-page story about John Thain today in which he  accuses Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis of lying about events surrounding the Bank of America – Merrill transaction and the ouster of Thain as a top Bank of America executive.  Thain spent most of his career at Goldman [...]

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Ken Lewis, the embattled CEO of Bank of America, has recently admitted to being coerced by U.S. Government officials to consummate the Merrill Lynch acquisition. The problem for Lewis is he may have neglected his fiduciary responsibility to shareholders in bowing to this pressure. The SEC is now investigating. See the video [...]

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Marshall Auerback here. Remind me again what Larry Summers was talking about when he spoke of the US as being a “nation of laws”, where “sanctity of contract” is sacrosanct?
In a case of first impression that could have far-reaching implications, a bankruptcy judge in California recently determined that municipalities that file petitions under Chapter [...]

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This comes via the website The Agonist (Hat tip Scott).  I have bolded the important bits:
So what are AIG’s arguments for making these bonus payments?

All 450 employees of AIG in London, where the derivatives contracts were booked and managed, signed retention contracts at the request of management in early 2008. This was at a time [...]

The AIG employees who are the subject of so much venom because they have received massive bonuses while their organizatio is being propped up by $170 billion in taxpayer money are not even in the United States. They are in London.

The large bonuses at AIG have sparked yet another wave of revulsion amongst American taxpeayers. And rightfully so. This company has cost taxpayers $170 billion and counting and yet the bonuses of the same individuals complicit in the losses is still to be paid due to contractual obligation. While Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers and others have expressed their contempt for this state of affairs, I suspect there will be consequences down the line.

Last summer, as a number of sinister revelations were made about the goings-on in the financial services sector, I speculated that we would definitely see the government going after individual executives for illegal activities. I saw Angelo Mozilo, the man with a tan, as the most likely scapegoat – a mortgage industry Ken Lay, if you will (see my August post “Ex-Countrywide CEO is the new Ken Lay“). Yet, none of this came to pass.