From the category archives:

Fed

The Great Sphinx and the Mystery of the Federal Reserve

January 11, 2010

The latest flap over taxpayer payments to Goldman Sachs confirms the culture of secrecy upon which the Fed in Washington and its New York counterpart are dependent.   They like the dark, closed-curtain life that bankers prefer, where the sunlight of public scrutiny is seldom an invited guest.  It is a culture to which Mr. Geithner [...]

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Captain Bernanke and the Titanic Fed

December 17, 2009

Catastrophe seems to have a more forgiving master in the Senate banking committee than in the pages of history. The captain of the Titanic was not given another chance at the wheel.  And unlike Mr. Bernanke, he had the decency to hit an iceberg only once. The Senate banking committee voted 16 to 7 today to [...]

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It’s the Fed, Not the Politburo

September 21, 2009

Even before the current crisis, the Fed was a powerful institution with few rivals for its Kremlin-like curtain of secrecy.  Now, it seems fated to acquire even more sweeping powers, with only a few followers of Jeffersonian ideals in Congress seemingly interested or capable of questioning that move. It is widely held that some public [...]

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Outrage of the Week: AIG and the Curse of Darkness

March 7, 2009

Lack of daylight in boardrooms and in the way business was done on Wall Street and in the financial sector is what brought this company and the world to this perilous and costly state. Darkness and a lack of transparency are still being employed today under the guise of bringing a solution to the problem [...]

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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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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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Outrage of the Week: The Hijacking of American Capitalism

September 20, 2008

The promise of this new era of market miracles has been shamefully betrayed by a self-serving collection of greedy CEOs, disengaged directors and regulators who, far from envisioning the new frontier of the global economy, have shown themselves unable to see even into the next week. It was advertised as a sure path to wealth [...]

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AIG Bailout: And Taxpayers Didn’t Get a Guarantee for their $85 Billion?

September 18, 2008

It is bad enough that an insurance company, which should know a thing or two about risk, was so badly run that it needed to have the U.S. government nationalize it to the tune of an $85 billion purchase.  But when the White House admits that taxpayers may not even see their money returned, you [...]

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The Government from Simbirsk*

September 17, 2008

Without a shot being fired or a ballot being cast, the United States government has been overtaken by an act of socialism on a scale that is as incomprehensible as it is shocking.   Now, in addition to being the world’s largest mortgage backer as a result of its takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, [...]

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