
This article is cross-posted from Naked Capitalism.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been celebrated as the progressive Great White Hope. But the danger of assuming leadership is that that individual becomes a target both of attacks and of seduction. And while I’d like to think better of Schneiderman, an announcement earlier this evening has strong hallmarks of Schneiderman falling prey to the combined pressures and blandishments of the Administration and its allies.
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So, who you gonna believe, a Nobel Lauraete, taking on his election year hack role as a Democrat, or your lying eyes, looking at miles and miles of abandoned manufacturing areas across the midwest and northeast, and shuttered main streets across the country where Wal-Mart, packed with Chinese manufactures monopolizing a good chunk of “personal consumption” in those communities?
You may have heard positive things about Margin Call, a new bankster suspense drama loosely based on the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. I just saw the film, and my advice: Don’t waste your time and cash, not unless you want…
This article was first published on the CounterPunch website The breathlessly awaited government report that promised to shore up public confidence by explaining why the stock market briefly plunged 998 points on May 6, with hundreds of stocks momentarily losing…
Now I know what they mean when the media uses that word “outrage.” I saw it with my own eyes, during yesterday’s Congressional hearings with Tim Geithner. Turns out “outrage” refers to a ritual whereby Congressmen in Washington put on…
Gold coin issued by Nicholas Deak at the peak of the last gold boom While working on my upcoming book out here in the High Desert, I went off on one of those research tangents that led me to an…
Once again, the Case/Schiller Index has lived up to its name. All summer long, real estate shills have used it to jack up homebuyer confidence and fluff the housing market. Now, they are doing it again. Just look at the bullshit…
If you search your favorite news aggregate for “US housing market”, you’ll find a whole mess of headlines guaranteed to make you feel good about that crappy McTractHome you might have bought at the height of the real estate orgy….
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Every now and then I run across some important finance type saying something so patently crazy, such a complete howler, that it just stops me little brain. The most recent one of these was from Myron Scholes in the New…
The results are in and, completely and utterly to no surprise at all, the US banking system is in decent fundamental shape. Yup, Dr. Geithner and Nurse Bernanke had the 19 largest banks in the US drop trow, grabbed their…
One of the things Wall Street does best is confuse people. They are brilliant at it, making simple things seem complex. So today we’re going to go over one of the things they’re trying to make obscure and make them…
There aren’t a huge number of constants in the world of finance. First of all, that word, finance, includes a guy sitting in a cube cold-calling retirees while he’s working at Fidelity. It also includes Larry Fink, the CEO of…