crisis

You are a teacher at a local primary school. Each school day you and some of your colleagues watch over the children at the school playground to make sure all of the children follow the rules and keep their hands to themselves. Your role is…

Watch the hour-long retrospective which aired tonight on PBS’s Frontline.  It should be very enlighteningregarding the seeds of the bubble and meltdown.  It examines who the players in the 1990s and 2000s were, what their attitude to…

In one of my latest posts I said “greed is not good.” Quite frankly, I looked at this statement as self-evident in the wake of an economic catastrophe where greed was a defining element. Yet, a remarkable number of people commented in…

In the 1987 movie classic Wall Street, the sinister protagonist Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas gives this famous quote: In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a…

Marshall Auerback here.  I want to add a few thoughts on the situation in Latvia which Ed has highlighted on several occasions. His allusion to Argentina to describe the situation in the Baltics last July was on the money. I have a solution…

Remember when Paul Krugman asked aloud “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” He had a very well-received answer.  But he left out something. The elephant in the room was debt.  No one seems to have been noticing. Below is a…

Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke told us when the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was launched that they were not concerned about the health of our banking system.  In fact, this was not the case. They were concerned about specific…

The following is my translation of a much-discussed article that appeared in Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet at the weekend.  This information was being withheld from the public and leaked at an inopportune moment. Note that the…

In a 9-page Vanity Fair article “Wall Street’s Near-Death Experience,”giving us a sneak peek into the lives of bankers during the global meltdown last Autumn a hilarious quote of great significance was buried. At issue was the near-death…

Marshall Auerback sent me a link to a recent Simon Johnson missive about Goldman Sachs. I had already seen and liked this article, but his e-mail prompted me to write this post. My question is: Why is Goldman a bank holding company?…