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In a case of very strange bedfellows, Neil Barofsky, like Alan Greenspan, is also unhappy with Dodd-Frank. On the other hand, who listens to credit rating agencies anymore anyway? Maybe that's the distortion. Continue reading
Amar Bhidé, author of 'A Call for Judgment,' explains how the 'embrace of flawed finance' by Wall Street and politicians led to 2008's financial crisis and why there is the need for banks to return to judging risk on a 'case by case' basis. Continue reading
Simply to characterize U.S. private equity as a bunch of big operators looking to snare 'elephant-sized' corporate assets, as Andrew Ross Sorkin does in a New York Times story, is a distortion of reality. Continue reading
The decline of IPOs is worrisome, but not for the reasons Felix Salmon talks about. It's a concern because a lack of IPOs will result in a shift toward a larger, more concentrated, less nimble corporate economy. Continue reading
Is it me, Mr. Risk, or are disasters visiting us more regularly? The glib answer is: Blame the media. You're spending too much time watching the Weather Channel or YouTube. Or maybe it's just lousy luck: a gigantic earthquake, tsunami... Continue reading
A pair of economists, the World Bank's Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and the University of Tilburg's Harry Huizinga, want to show that big banks are not only dangerous but inefficient, suboptimal and lousy investments. The former is obvious. Continue reading
Errors may be made, but markets (and banks) tend to overheat and crash with startling regularity. And while there may be fraud, it probably would not have made a difference in the scope of the disaster. Crashes tend not to be conspiracies. Continue reading
Today, General Mills, a food company founded in 1846 in Minnesota, hung a very handsome banner above the entrance to the NYSE in commemoration of St. Patrick's Day. Continue reading
Blame the Brits. In 1942, in the midst of world conflagration, the Brits went squishy. Sir William Beveridge, a member of Churchill's wartime government (he actually worked for Labour Minister Ernest Bevin, who wanted to get rid of him because... Continue reading
The study and debate of corporate governance tends to involve a search for proving the tenets of that theoretical construct, shareholder democracy. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Continue reading
The Internet is just like good old-fashioned journalism except more so. The old ways were often pretty crappy. So are the new. Blaming aggregation, or HuffPo, for what ails us is silly. Continue reading
Charlie Gasparino a) believes Eliot Spitzer did an 'uneven job' as New York AG and b) is 'polarizing' as a political figure and c) might have abetted the financial crisis by chasing Hank Greenberg out of AIG. In short, Gasparino thinks a Spitzer run would be a disaster. Continue reading
The mistake The New York Times makes in a story Thursday is that both lawmakers and shareholders really don't give a fig about Wall Street pay as long as they get the returns, or the contributions, they desire. Continue reading
My recent review of Amar Bhidé's book 'A Call for Judgment,' which makes the so-called utility bank argument, raises an issue that has been overlooked: the unintended consequences of partial regulation. Continue reading
