September 22nd, 2011 The Occupy Wall Street protests, which kicked off last Saturday, have been derided as an irrelevance by the likes of Nathalie Rothschild in Spiked, and largely ignored by the mainstream media. I accept that the turnout has been much lower than predicted and that some of the protestors are whimsical youngsters who seem somewhat […]
April 21st, 2011 In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the 635-page report prepared by Senator Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the causes of the financial crisis, Anatomy of a Financial Collapse. Among other things the report alleges that New York-based investment bank Goldman Sachs, known as […]
February 28th, 2011 Charles Ferguson’s movie about the financial crisis, Inside Job, released in the US in October 2010, richly deserved to win ‘Best Documentary’ at last night’s Oscars. Amid all the flimflam about actresses’ dresses and the other flaky stuff one’s subjected to around Oscars’ time, the Academy Award for Inside Job is an […]
August 5th, 2010 I just found Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s blog which, perhaps better than anything else I’ve read, enscapsulates the corrosive internal culture at New York-based investment bank Goldman Sachs. In 2005 Garcia-Martinez was studying for a physics PhD at the University of California, Berkley when he was tempted to Wall Street by the prospect of […]
May 1st, 2010 Image: Freedom’s Phoenix New York-based financial blogger the Epicurean Dealmaker has written an excellent blog post which outlines why America has fallen out of love with the squid. The writer, himself an investment banker, suggests that the Americans have finally had the scales lifted from their eyes and recognised that a devious and […]
March 22nd, 2010 The former Salomon Brothers bond trader who lifted the lid on sharp practice in Wall Street with Liar’s Poker in 1989 has returned to his former stamping ground. In a new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis focuses not on bulge-bracket banks but on a small band of […]
January 14th, 2010 Mike Mayo, an analyst and managing director at brokerage CLSA, yesterday delivered a memorable diagnosis of what went wrong with the US banking sector. In his testimony to the US Congress’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Mayo also prescribed some cures (to be outlined in a future blog post) Mayo is appalled by the […]
October 5th, 2008 The Observer’s business editor Ruth Sunderland today points out that those who dare to suggest that something was rotten with the status quo ante in banking and finance are, in some quarters, being branded as Marxists who are seeking to “bring down capitalism” (read her column or see below). This is playground […]
September 29th, 2008 Henry “Hank” Paulson pitched it as a panacea for America’s financial woes. But, despite all the sabre-rattling and doom-mongering from US president George Bush, the people of America have not allowed themselves to be hoodwinked. Why should they take ownership of the very worst loans and other assets assembled by the former […]
15th September, 2008 American politicians and regulators have called Dick Fuld’s bluff this weekend. Until the weekend, there was a view that certain banks are simply “too big [and too pivotal to the global financial system] to fail”. Fuld, chief executive of Lehman Brothers, one of the least responsible of America’s rapidly diminishing band of […]