Category Archive

In the Washington Monthly, Senator Byron L. Dorgan — I'll only include snippets: Last spring, when the stock market took its hair-raising ride, in one corner of Wall Street there was more than the usual anxiety. In fact, there was stockbrokers-looking-for-upper-floor-windows kind of fright. In April, clients of the giant Bankers Trust New York Inc.–including Procter & Gamble–took multimillion dollar … Read More

By now, if you're atturned to this sort of thing, you have read the resignation of AIG executive Jake DeSantos which was printed in the New York Times.  I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here's a snippet: It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take … Read More

At least 9 of the top 10 have returned the bonus though as an overall percentage of the $218 billion, it still has plenty of room to grow. Nine of the top 10 recipients of

Wall Street Journal: Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his colleagues worked the phones to try to line up support on Wall Street for the plan announced Monday. They told executives they don't favor using the tax code to retroactively penalize specific individuals who had received bonuses, according to people familiar with the calls. They asked officials to sign on … Read More

Econ4U: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently issued a warning about deceptive websites that claim to offer free credit reports. These sites actually end up charging their customers for credit monitoring subscriptions, and they don’t even offer anything you can’t already get for free. As the FTC says, “Despite the musical claims of some TV commercials, the only authorized source … Read More

The Dow is up over 400 points right now.  If it stays that way, it will be the 15th largest gain in history (point-wise, not percentage-wise). I guess that means Wall Street likes Geitner's plan… but I'm not sure that's a good thing or a bad thing, seeing as how Wall Street got us in this mess in the first place, … Read More

Get used to that acronym. It's the shorthand term for the plan, unveiled today, about how to deal with the "toxic assets", which is at the core, the epicenter, the root, of all our current economic woes: Here it is in a nutshell: Under the new so-called "Public-Private Investment Program", taxpayer funds will be used to seed partnerships with private … Read More

I hope this gets talked about more: Absent supplementals, the United States currently runs a defense budget of just over half a trillion dollars, a number which does not include defense-related spending in other departments. By the kindest calculations, this means that the U.S. spends roughly four to six times as much on defense as our closest competitor. By less … Read More