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The Goldman case revolves around the CDOs. So, we must begin with these vehicles. A CDO, or collateralized debt obligation, is a security, only more complex than traditional securities such as stocks and bonds. The complexity is not conceptual, as in, say, quantum mechanics, but procedural and functional. It can be measured by the words …
Last week, Greece became the byword for the European “fiscal crisis”. The mainstream press and media pulled out all the stops in hyping an impending doom if the severest austerity measure were not put in place – and soon. The Financial Times had little else in its opinion pages except warnings by its regular and …
Reading Between the Lines: Europeans Will Be Europeans No More Read More »
James Cayne, the ex-CEO of Bear Stearns, and his lieutenants were called before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission I know not for what. Even when everyone feigned surprise, it was a tired show. Surprise! Cayne did not curse. The Wall Street Journal: At times, it seemed like the panel was caught off-guard by the matter-of-fact …
I was reading about tomorrow’s elections in England, when I thought of Tony Blair which reminded me of the two-part series, The Meaning of “System” in Systemic Risk. I had meant to end the series with an epilogue, but I forgot. So, if you were following it, my apologies for what surely seemed like an …
Epilogue: The Meaning of “System” in Systemic Risk Read More »
Data released by the Commerce Department today showed that, once again, American consumers are spending more and saving less. As reported in The Financial Times, a JPMorgan analyst interpreted the numbers thus in a note to his clients: Speculation that consumers are reforming, repenting and rebalancing now looks premature or overstated. So, we are back …
You must know about the “freak shows” that were popular up until the middle of the last century. These macabre circuses traveled from place to place and exhibited their “freaks”: the elephant man, the snake woman, the scorpion girl and such. The rabble went and paid to look at the freaks and count their blessings. …
Last week, the inaugural meeting of the Institute for New Economic Thinking was held in Cambridge University. Gillian Tett attended the meeting and covered it for the readers of the Financial Times: In the genteel surroundings of the Great Hall of Kings College, Cambridge, dozens of the world’s leading economists conducted an earnest conference on …
A Gathering of Donkeys at the “Genteel Surroundings of the Great Hall of Kings College” Read More »
“What really for me marks a conservative judge is one who doesn’t decide more than he has to in order to do his own job. Our job is to decide cases and resolve controversies. It’s not to write broad rules that may answer society’s questions at large.” Thus spake Justice John Paul Stevens of the …
Dialectics is the investigation of the relation between the whole and the part. In the past couple of times that I wrote about the illegality of the Fed’s actions, I put them in the context of a larger development of social decay. But there are also the parts. Like the individual lines in a painting …
I was a taken aback when I read in the Wall Street Journal that the Federal Reserve Board had a “director of fine arts program”. It was like learning that the Islamic Republic of Iran had a chief sommelier. You don’t quite know what to make of it. Apparently, both the office and the title …