What’s an investor to do? In the past three weeks, Greece melted down, a terrorist attacked Times Square, the Dow dropped 600 points in seven minutes and then spiked back up, BP befouled the Gulf of Mexico, and a volcano wrecked the airline industry’s profit plans. If you’re sensible you, um, buy stocks.
This isn’t a [...]
Now we know exactly what Republicans have in mind for consumer protection: No new protection, period. The proposal they introduced in the Senate yesterday amounts to a wipeout. Nothing would happen at all to stop future predatory loans.
The Administration want an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency with its own budget and authority to act. The [...]
Dear Warren,
What were you thinking?
Your defense of Goldman Sachs, at your annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting, boiled down to “everybody does it, so no big deal.” You saw nothing special about the Abacus CDO, where Goldman failed to tell its mark—er, its customer—that the investment was designed to fail. It was up to the buyer [...]
You’re not going to want to hear this, but the $700 billion provided for the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) may be the best money we never entirely spent. Hat’s of to TPM for putting together what we know of the cost so far.
The U.S. Treasury has disbursed $536.6 billion for the programs [...]
My father was a CEO, of the ’50s and ’60s generation. He lived, in his later years, in a state of shock at the grabbing greed of his corporate successors. Plenty of self-enriching louts rose to the top in his day. But instead of being admired in the executive suite, their behavior was generally deplored.
It [...]
