Tag Archives | Wall Street
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Insider Trading: A Window On Our Economy

April 7, 2011

Insider trading is making more headlines than we have seen since Ivan Boesky was fitted with handcuffs back in 1986. This morning’s newspapers report the arrests of Matthew Kluger and Garrett Bauer, a lawyer-trader pair who have apparently been at it for seventeen years. A third party in the scheme is cooperating with authorities. Yesterday, [...]

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Financial Reform: Sound Bites and Window Dressing

January 8, 2011

On Thursday, Representative Michele Bachmann (Tea Party Republican of Minnesota) introduced a bill to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform. With the Senate and Obama standing in the way, it won’t go anywhere. But who cares? The 2008 market crisis should have prompted serious reforms. Instead, we got sweeping window dressing. Dodd-Frank left in place the [...]

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Inside Job – Movie Recommendation

October 21, 2010

If you see just one movie this year, make it the documentary Inside Job. Then tell everyone you know to see it. In just two hours, through interviews with financiers, politicians and academics, it builds a case that greed and deregulation have corrupted not only Wall Street, but Washington and academia as well. If you don’t know [...]

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Not Your Parents’ Stock Market

August 22, 2010

After the 2000 tech bubble, followed by the broader market collapse in 2001-2002, it didn’t take long for individual Investors to return to the stock market. This time is different. The Investment Company Institute reports that Investors actually withdrew a whopping $33 billion from domestic equity mutual funds in the first seven months of this [...]

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Hedge Funds: Who’ll Take the Toxic Waste?

August 10, 2007

Long before Mark Twain stood on Wall Street and saw it was a “street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other,” there has been financial manipulation and scams. During the Punic Wars against Carthage, businessmen offered to ship supplies to Rome’s army on condition the state insured their ships and [...]