From the category archives:

Wall Street and Main Street

Who Leaked the News About the Goldman Settlement?

July 15, 2010

When the SEC filed civil charges against Goldman Sachs last April, we postulated that the end game would be: …one of those vague and disappointing resolutions for which the SEC has become famous, as discussed here,  whereby the defendant company’s shareholders pay a pile of money as a penalty for what management did (but for [...]

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Lessons from the Botched EU Bailout and other TARP Follies

May 17, 2010

Ordinary people from Athens to Little Rock have had it with a bloated system where politicians take care of themselves, along with insiders and powerful interests when they run amok, and leave the public to scrimp, sacrifice and struggle to pay more debt. As we predicted, the stock-lifting EUporia over the European rescue plan that [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Washington Silent as Dow Plunges [UPDATED]

May 6, 2010

Panic makes an encore appearance after Wall Street’s record drop.  America’s leaders do not. The word perilous hardly begins to describe the times.  Much of the world’s economy is only beginning to see daylight after the financial storm of generations.  Trust in Wall Street and the mechanisms of government is at record lows. In Europe, [...]

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Still Searching for Signs of Life on the Bear Stearns Board

May 4, 2010

Corporate governance at the failed Wall Street giant had all the hallmarks of a disengaged boardroom stacked with cronies and dominated by insiders. Finally, Congress can shed some light on where the board was at Bear Stearns — or if it existed at all. Former Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne will be making a rare [...]

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Goldman’s Exhibits of Wall Street Insincerity

April 28, 2010

Collectively, in their pivotal appearance before Congress, Goldman’s top performers could not muster the sincerity, transparency or gravitas of a used car salesman.  It is unlikely to play well on Main Street. Nothing illustrates the folly and arrogance of Wall Street more than the appearance of the Goldman Sachs executives who testified yesterday before the [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Alice in Boardland and Other Fairy Tales About Lehman Brothers

April 23, 2010

Leonard Lance, (R.NJ): Mr. Cruikshank, to follow up in your remarks.   Do you believe there were corporate governance failures at Lehman? Thomas Cruikshank, Chairman, Lehman board auit committee: No, I don’t. I think our governance procedures were really very, very good. House Committee on Financial Services, April 20, 2010 A number of revealing facts emerged from [...]

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The Examiner of Lehman’s Untoasted Boardroom Marshmallows

March 14, 2010

The court-appointed Examiner chose to continue the same lackadaisical approach to directorial performance and accountability in his search for answers as the directors themselves evidenced in their drowsy drift toward disaster. A little noted statement in the report of the court-appointed Examiner in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy reveals the extent of the deference displayed to [...]

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“Catch Me if You Can” and Other Fine Relics from the Lehman Boardroom

March 11, 2010

Once again, an inept board escapes culpability through a Houdini-like contrivance called the business judgment rule, one of the most anti-shareholder and destructive of legal principles ever to emerge in modern times. Lehman Brothers made a brief return in the news today, just long enough to fall into another abyss of folly and misjudgment that [...]

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The Half-Baked Pie that Hit Bank of America Shareholders in the Face

February 24, 2010

The settlement was not crafted to act as a deterrent to future wrongdoing or to give the investing public confidence that the SEC is looking out for their interests in this post-Madoff era. U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff had finally approved the settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Bank of America.  Our [...]

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