From the category archives:

Capital Markets

Is the Senate Buying Another TARP in Ben Bernanke?

January 26, 2010

The Senate’s vote for the Fed’s Chairman will be viewed as a crucial test for who stands with Wall Street and who stands with Main Street. After some slightly encouraging rumblings in the contrary direction, it appears that the Senate is poised to confirm Ben Bernanke to a second term as Chairman of the Federal [...]

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Why Canada’s Stock Markets Attracted Russian Mobsters Like a Magnet

October 26, 2009

Even a former Premier of Ontario claimed he was duped as he presided over this fraudster’s scheme. The odd name YBM Magnex suddenly emerged from its shadowy past last week when the FBI placed Semion Mogilevich, its Russian mobster mastermind, on its “Ten Most Wanted” list. He is accused of swindling Canadian and U.S. investors [...]

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What If Citigroup Had a Real Board? Part 2

November 21, 2008

There is a reason why the bank’s board appears little more than a bystander to the destruction of shareholder wealth.  A good part of it has to do with its discredited governance structure. Watching Citigroup’s shares crash through the 10 dollar level, then nine, then eight, seven, six -like some kind of inexorable countdown leading [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Paulson and Bernanke Flunk the Confidence Test

November 14, 2008

In a time when the restoration of confidence, perhaps more than even financial liquidity, is paramount in calming markets and providing stability, neither the Treasury secretary nor the chairman of the Fed acquitted themselves well this week. As the war in Iraq unfolded, and then morphed into disaster in its first several years, the world discovered the [...]

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Paulson the Magnificent?

November 12, 2008

The funny thing about prescience, Mr. Secretary, is that it should occasionally bear some relationship to the future, or even just next week. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr’s announcement today of yet another rejiggered financial recovery plan contained enough reversals in direction to make an Olympic swimmer dizzy.  But it was his Carnac statement that [...]

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October of the Fleeting Trillions

October 31, 2008

The magnitude of the financial injury worldwide and the costs to repair it are breathtaking.  But the loss of faith occasioned by what so many see as a colossal betrayal on the part of leaders and institutions may prove the most damaging of all. The tenth month in the Gregorian calendar will go into history [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Bankers Binging on the Bush Bailout Bonanza

October 25, 2008

Even in the face of their debacles of historic proportion, many of these institutions persist in acting in a manner more resembling an economic sociopath than a responsible steward of the public interest, whose salvation has essentially been made possible and underwritten by the American taxpayer. Reminiscent of another major Bush administration blunder where what [...]

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The Greenspan Myth and Other Hazards When Men are Called Gods

October 24, 2008

The once powerful and still influential former Fed chairman took no lessons at all from the carnage of Enron and other scandals that occurred on his watch, where boards had shown themselves to be utterly incapable of monitoring the ethical and financial health of company after company, and management’s approach to risk was the financial equivalent of [...]

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Tea, Anyone?

October 13, 2008

The British breakthrough, and how it managed to smash the U.S. bailout logjam and get it moving, is just one more of those crazy, topsy-turvy turns on the bumpy road to financial sanity -and another indication that America’s global preeminence is facing some challenges. Finally, a coherent plan seems to be emerging to address some, and [...]

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