Archive for May, 2010
McCain Fakes Out Media Matters With 3-d Chess Move
John McCain, who has pretty much reincarnated himself as one of the sorrier hacks in the Republican party, yesterday produced the most embarrassingly misguided attack on Elena Kagan to date. He attacked her for her complicity in a policy that Harvard has followed since Kagan was nine years old: HANNITY: Your reaction to her? Are [...]
Why The Market Melted Last Thursday, Version 2.0
After last Thursday’s unprecedented market meltdown, the early word was that “a massively wrong trade in Procter & Gamble Inc., maybe with a trader entering an order for “billion” instead of “million”” was to blame. But that turns out to have been just a baseless rumor, after all. Widely reported, but baseless. It seems to [...]
Inadvertently Misrepresenting The News
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Goldman Sachs’ trading operation made money every single day last quarter: Goldman Sachs Group Inc. traders didn’t lose any money at the end of each trading day during the first quarter, a first for the Wall Street firm, which typically loses funds on at least a handful [...]
Mortgage Derivatives Fraud, Take Two
Goldman Sachs is widely acknowledged to be the market leader in its field. Most other investment banks accept it as their karma to follow in its footsteps. But they don’t have to like it. And Morgan Stanley couldn’t be too pleased about following Goldman Sachs down this particular path: U.S. federal investigators are probing whether [...]
The CEO Stock Option Racket
An AP article yesterday about CEO pay contained this startling statement, that I think is more important than anything else contained in the article: And companies doled out more stock and options than usual because grants from the previous year had fallen so much in value that many people thought they’d never be worth anything. [...]
Idle Thoughts, SCOTUS Edition
So by all accounts, President Obama will announce this morning that he is nominating Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. It occurs to me it might be both interesting and profitable to make book on which Republican Senator will offer the most absurdly unfair criticism of her nomination. (I would probably back John [...]
NYT: The Return Of The Good Old Days
The New York Times is furiously wiping something off its face, and it doesn’t look like egg to me. Once again, they have been caught simply making up stuff and passing it along, hiding behind the flimsy skirts of the anonymous source routine: McClatchy Newpapers is reporting that “U.S. officials” are contending that there is [...]
Idle Thoughts
This morning, we learned that in April, the economy added 290,000 jobs, the largest increase we have seen since March 2006 (when George Bush was president, and still had 33 months left to wreak his unique brand of economic destruction, which thoughtfully spared the have-a-lots while showing no mercy to the have-nots). House Minority Leader [...]
Unprecedented Market Meltdown
I have conducted an unscientific poll, and I’m sorry to report that by this time tomorrow the vast majority of Americans will have lost all confidence in stock markets all over again. Any good pollster reveals her methodology, and the exact phrasing of the questions asked. My poll was conducted by reading a couple of [...]
The Republican Notion Of Bipartisanship
Ron Brownstein had a story in the National Journal over the weekend, pointing out exactly how much the Republican Party’s position on immigration has moved since the good old days of 2006, when lawmakers from both parties actually worked together constructively even on the thorniest of issues, and obstructionism manifested itself not in the Senate [...]