Category: Bank Tax

Not surprisingly our old friend Andy Kessler gets it exactly right. Forget smarter regulators or smarter banks; that’ll never happen. Raise capital requirements, limiting the banks ability to create money and fund poor investments. More people read Andy than read us, by a couple orders of magnitude, so now all we have to do is [...]

It seems like whenever the government or its apologists want to distract attention from government’s responsibility for the financial crisis they start talking about hedge funds. Thus Bloomberg’s headline today about Volcker’s testimony: “Volcker Says Hedge Funds Should be Allowed to Fail”
Well, when weren’t they? The only hedge fund that ever moved the U.S. government [...]

It was a disappointing but not surprising piece in the NYT today from the man we still regard as the greatest Fed Chairman in history. Paul Volcker’s long and rambling commentary re-states one inoffensive but irrelevant reform proposal and another that would perpetuate the worst in the current system.
The small but irrelevant proposal is to [...]

Here’s the President’s problem. It’s not just that he is far to the left of the average American. It’s that for all his high-mindedness he is operating in a different ethical scheme than most Americans—and he does not seem to know it.
What the President really seems to regard as the defense of high principle Americans [...]

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// Statement by Andrew Redleaf, CEO, White Box Advisors, a leading investment firm and Co-Author of the upcoming book Panic
“The risk is that the big banks become like tobacco companies or casinos; the government starts by campaigning to eliminate vice and then finds it’s addicted to the revenue. Rather than creating more incentives for government to [...]