April 29, 2010 – 12:05 pm
Browsing a litigation magazine borrowed from my favorite legal beagle – as a non-lawyer, I’m a little put off even by the idea of a litigation magazine – I ran across a neat online resource from Stanford Law School on shareholder lawsuits. Stanford’s Securities Class Action Clearinghouse, in collaboration with litigation consultant Cornerstone Research, tracks shareholder lawsuits, [...]
April 19, 2010 – 10:21 am
The Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against Goldman Sachs strikes deeply at the issue of trust in the capital markets. Both the firm and the markets as a whole suffered yet another blow in the SEC suit. And it will not be the last. My Monday-morning question on this latest Wall Street scandal: If you [...]
February 22, 2010 – 3:45 pm
For starters, “a pig in a poke” is an ancient expression referring to a scam in the Middle Ages. The trickster would go to the market with a bag tied at the top – inside was an active, wriggling animal that the seller promoted as a small pig. The hapless farmer who bought this bag [...]
January 27, 2010 – 11:47 pm
The late economist John Maynard Keynes has been mentioned more than once in the news coverage of President Obama’s State of the Union speech.
For a little comic relief from all the analysis of Washington and our economy, here’s a fun video – OK, so maybe fun is in the eye of the beholder – let’s [...]
January 8, 2010 – 9:24 pm
Brian Wesbury, chief economist at First Trust Advisors, is seeing V’s everywhere. A strong recovery, he believes, is in full swing for the US economy. The stock market, of course, is up. His graphs all show a V-shaped ascent after the nosedive of 2008.
Yet people everywhere are still worried, intent on reliving the worst of the [...]
December 12, 2009 – 3:38 pm
This weekend’s Wall Street Journal has a readable piece on what Warren Buffett didn’t invest in during the financial and economic crisis (“In Year of Living Dangerously, Buffett Looked ‘Into the Abyss’”) … Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Wachovia, Freddie Mac and others.
Besides making the point that deciding not to invest can be as important [...]
December 12, 2009 – 3:38 pm
This weekend’s Wall Street Journal has a readable piece on what Warren Buffett didn’t invest in during the financial and economic crisis (“In Year of Living Dangerously, Buffett Looked ‘Into the Abyss’”) … Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Wachovia, Freddie Mac and others.
Besides making the point that deciding not to invest can be as important [...]
October 29, 2009 – 8:29 pm
I’m getting a mental picture: The confident commander-in-chief strides across the flight deck of the USS Economy and addresses the aircraft carrier’s crew as a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner flies overhead. “The recession is over!”
Well, maybe we should hold off on photo ops.
The good news on third-quarter GDP rising, breaking the recessionary streak, doesn’t mean we’re finished with [...]
August 11, 2009 – 9:47 pm
As the pace of change accelerates – economically, culturally, personally – people are being overwhelmed with too much information to fully process, authors Tom Hayes and Michael Malone opine in a Wall Street Journal commentary on August 10, 2009. And that overload, they say, places a premium on the value of trusted sources:
Without the luxury of [...]
August 10, 2009 – 10:30 am
For a bit of comic relief check out “Mad Lib Earnings,” an all-too-true parody of earnings releases and the obligatory wire service stories that cover them. It’s Stanley Bing’s column on the last page of the August 17, 2009, Fortune magazine.
Bing’s fill-in-the-blanks earnings release makes our job easy. There’s a boilerplate quote from the CEO [...]
