Your investment advisor likely puts together your portfolio in the same way the busted banks put together their own portfolios of mortgage-backed securities
In Part I we talked about the first big idea that your investment advisor probably shares with your banker, especially if your bank is one of the big important ones that almost blew [...]
This Sunday, New York Times Magazine is publishing a story titled: HEADING OFF THE NEXT FINANCIAL CRISIS (Hat tip Mike Allen at Politico). In the piece New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt looks at the idea of preventing the next financial crisis, or at least making it less damaging. He includes a conversation he [...]
Health Care Bill Passes
Think “medical tourism”!
Samuelson rides his hobby horse but makes good points on Greenspan
Samuelson, like most guys with big idea, wants to fit everything into it these days. But it is his defenses of Greenspan that are most interesting. We used to be always attacking the fellow back in his maestro days, but [...]
Forget how sleazy this is. How stupid is it than someone with this kind of access is BUYING AIG in January 2008. Just goes to show how hopeless any regulatory solution is. This woman, along with Dodd himself, has privileged access to the best information available to the government. She is chief counsel to the [...]
Sorkin has the politics of this exactly right
Arguing over the street address of the consumer financial protection agency makes the GOP look dumb and on the take. (Sort of like real life.) There are really principled and therefor persuasive arguments against a consumer agency, like “consumer protection” in the form of forcing banks to make [...]
The whitewash of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has to be numbered among the most successful spin operations of our time. Within days of the market collapse in September ‘08, both Senator Dodd and Representative Frank were marching stooges up to Capitol Hill to testify that Fannie and Freddie—virtually run by the congressional committees chaired [...]
Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante column that appeared on RealClearMarkets.
The good side of Soros—and CDS
He’s obnoxious politically but you have to love a guy who has done so much over the years to expose sovereign financial finagling and make money doing it.
Predictably the governments of the world are taking seriously the idea of regulating CDS, now that these lie-detectors of the financial world are [...]
How is it that one man can be so wrong, so often, about such obvious things. Here he takes up the mantra that of course we need a consumer financial protection agency. If the banks are not duping the gullible then “ why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers.” [...]
This is among the most sober and well-argued pieces we have seen on the flaws of the administration’s financial reform proposals. We thought we might end up disagreeing more strongly when Wallison pulled out the old chestnut of the “moral hazard” supposedly created by too-big-to-fail. We have always been skeptical of the moral hazard explanation [...]
