February 2009

U.S. initial jobless claims soared to yet another 26-year high, registering 626,000 for the week ending January 31st. The continuing claims number was equally dreadful, hitting an all-time high of 4.79 million.

We are barely two weeks into Barack Obama's tenure and reports are surfacing everywhere that his "team of rivals" is at each other's throat. President Obama had said just after the election that he was looking to pull together the best and…

Bloomberg set to cut foreign-language channels - Telegraph Paterson Leaks Intended to Smear Kennedy -- Political Wire Russia's debt rating downgraded by Fitch - National Post Martin Wolf - Why Davos Man is waiting for Obama to save him -…

I do not think General Electric is AAA company -- far from it. Their finance arm GE Capital is at the center of the private equity and asset-backed security time bombs that have yet to explode. And this makes the cash flow expected from…

Harry Markopolos is a fraud examiner who once worked as a fund manager. He knows fraud when he sees it and he saw it as plain as day with Bernard Madoff, who ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history. In fact, he tipped off the regulators at…

The "Buy American" clause stuck onto the stimulus bill wending its way through Congress is a pernicious piece of legislation because it has engendered a ferocious response from trading partners, not the least of which is Canada. Below is a…

There is a lot of anecdotal fodder in support of my last post tagging deregulation as a root cause for the build up of excesses in the financial services industry. Let me give you one example from 1998.

There is a view making the rounds now that repealing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 is the root cause for all of the excesses we have experienced -- and by extension for the present economic Depression. Glass-Steagall was enacted in 1933…

UPDATE: 12 Jan 2010: I am re-publishing this for the third time because of the situation at AIG. The question that Tim Iacono asked on his site a year ago in the post "Why aren't Americans rioting?" is based on an article from Alternet.…

When the euro was introduced about ten years ago, the pessimists didn't give it much chance of reaching its tenth anniversary. The euro, or so the argument went, was doomed from the outset because of the wide spread in economic performance…