Recent Articles

Big Bedfellows

April 16, 2008 14:44

Last week found me lurking in the carpeted hallways of D.C.’s Capitol Hilton, press pass hanging from my neck. The occasion was the Council of Institutional Investors (CII) spring meeting, entitled “Thinking Globally.” I assume CII printed its glossy brochures before subprime hell broke loose, and i...

Soup of the Day

April 04, 2008 12:08

Treasury Secretary Paulson's fun-filled Blueprint for a Modernized Regulatory Structure proposes an “optimal” regulatory system that would populate the world with its offspring: FIDIs, PFRA, CBRA, FFSPs, and so forth. As the debate over financial services regulation drags on, everyone now gets to to...

Food for Thought

April 01, 2008 02:02

I’m so looking forward to reading Secretary Paulson’s 212-page regulatory proposal. I just hope he’ll explain that stuff I kept reading in the papers last week about how investment banks aren’t regulated, because I have this weird recollection of being a lawyer on Wall Street for 15 years and readin...

A Few Dollars More

March 27, 2008 00:28

This was supposed to be one of those interactive web polls, but I ran into a technological issue. So please just vote silently to yourselves.JP Morgan’s decision to raise its Bear Stearns bid from 2 bucks to 10 bucks is best described as:(a) A victory for Bear shareholders and the awesome power of D...

Seeking Liquidity

March 25, 2008 14:09

I think we’re all learning a lot from the Bear Stearns (BSC) thing. Sorry, I know writers are supposed to avoid vague words like "thing," but Fed Chairman Bernanke hates the term "bailout" and I don’t want to increase the poor guy's stress level. So even though Jamie Dimon is slotted to get the Man...

You Rock, IRS

March 25, 2008 13:43

Thanks to Hillary Clinton, we all know who gave Barack Obama sound bites for his speeches. But what genius has been feeding lines to folks at the SEC? Last week an SEC official devoted an entire speech – in Australia*, no less – to a strained analogy between the 1962 western, The Man Who Shot Lib...

Fake Spring Break

March 24, 2008 22:07

You know you're really slacking off when you don't even put up your "hey, I'm slacking off this week" post until the week is over and you're back.Anyway, I am (was) slacking off this week. Not entirely, though. I did write a guest post for this blog and a column for the Hartford Business Journal....

Logical Choices

March 11, 2008 01:53

I’ve been lackadaisically browsing the testimony from Friday's executive compensation hearings just in case California Congressman Henry Waxman unearthed anything that we in the left-wing antibusiness press (bugbear of Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo) didn’t already know about. BTW, you can’t imagine ...

It's Just a Phase

March 10, 2008 21:24

After years of yakking, policy wonks still haven't answered this question: What the Heck Are We Going to Do With All These Baby Boomers? This issue has a bunch of workplace subtopics, including: (1) How Are We Going To Get Them To Leave Once And For All So We Can Have Their Aeron Chairs? (2) OMG,...

Over There

March 01, 2008 17:44

Here at Proxyland I leave heavy number-crunching to the experts. Which is good, because some numbers in the 4th quarter 6-K that UBS (UBS) filed yesterday are painful to look at, including this one: $13.7 billion in mortgage-related write-offs.So I'm just skimming through the company’s narrative, w...