Companies that received bailout money giving generously to candidates Washington Post By T.W. Farnam October 24, 2010 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell [R-KY] was a fierce critic of the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler last year, saying he "cannot ask the American taxpayer to subsidize failure." But General Motors doesn’t seem to hold […]
Justices, 5-4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit New York Times By ADAM LIPTAK January 21, 2010 WASHINGTON — Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, […]
Just in case you suspect me of obsessing about the financial crisis as a way of avoiding thinking about the upcoming election – Bingo! But I do check in on 538/New York Times occasionally [recall that Nathan Deal is a bankrupt crook]. Oh well, it is the mid-terms. It’s kind of hard to work up […]
So what drove the financial crisis? How did the Housing Bubble, the SubPrime Mortgages, the trading in Synthetic Derivatives all come together? Which were the chickens? Which were the eggs? Was it a plan, an attitude, or maybe just a perfect storm? One thing for sure, Alan Greenspan was a key player: The thing I […]
First Pass 1boringoldman’s Third Law of Economics: What Greenspan says here is absolutely wrong. “What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so,” […]
This time I’m going to play fair and put the Law at the top of the post, then discuss it: 1boringoldman’s Second Law of Economics: Growth is a required illusion. Not only can you not really make money, the sustained growth that we always think about when we talk about our money is an illusion […]
You can’t make money unless you are the Federal Reserve Bank or a Counterfeiter. You can earn money or you can take money. But you simply cannot make money. All of this money that the wealthy investors "make" and their managers "make" is taken from somewhere. 1boringoldman in making money… [12/18/2008] I wrote that a […]
Enough with the graphs, already. And anyway, we regular people shouldn’t have to take a look at those complex spaghetti graphs to figure out if we’re being taken care of. How could we have known that Greenspan was out in left field? Should we have seen this coming by listening to what he said? I […]
It’s hard for me to really believe that a single force can be as destructive as I’m beginning to believe Alan Greenspan was in our Financial woes. He’s getting right up there with the greats of recent history like Dick Cheney. He seems to have carried several core beliefs that lead him astray. This post […]
Last week I was obsessing about inflation and the CPI-U [Consumer Price Index, Urban]. But then I ran across an article about Volcker’s attacking Inflation that said something like, "and in his tenure, housing was in the CPI-U." I tried to find out what that meant, but was unsuccessful. Recall that the question was about […]