General Motors CEO Ed Whitacre boasted in The Wall Street Journel last week that his company paid back its government bailout “in full, with interest, years ahead of schedule.” GM has subsequently began running advertisements promoting its financial responsibility while proponents of the bailouts are yelling, “I told you so!” But, writing for Forbes, Shikha […]
A series of Goldman Sachs executives, chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein included, were called to Washington this Tuesday to testify before the United States Senate. The firm is front and center in the Democrats’ quest for Wall Street reform, such as preventing banks from becoming “too big to fail” lest taxpayers once again be called […]
Simon Johnson, former chief economist with the International Monetary Fund and currently an MIT professor of entrepreneurship, has been arguing for the forced downsizing of Wall Street’s biggest banks for well over a year. In May 2009 he fiercely criticized what he described as the country’s “financial oligarchy” for creating the 2008 crisis and subsequently […]
Given that our country is mired in a severe recession, the history of the Great Depression — especially the history of how we got out of it — is rightly regarded as relevant to fixing today’s problems. Some popular accounts would have us believe that the Great Depression ended via a) FDR’s New Deal and/or […]
Arianna Huffington complains about what she calls “the real Wall Street crime” at her online newspaper today in an entry entitled, “Shorting the Middle Class.” According to Huffington, big banks, for decades, have been “selling” the American people a promise of unending prosperity while in truth, they facilitated the transfer of wealth from America’s middle […]
President Barack Obama was unusually defiant in his weekly televised address this Saturday, attacking special interests and “their allies in Washington” for resisting financial reform. The recession, according to the president, was caused by the financial industry. Indeed, it could have been avoided “if Wall Street firms were more accountable, if financial dealings were more […]
Note to the left: not everything is about race.
Ayn Rand described as the proudest distinction of Americans, “because it contains all the others,” she believed, the fact that they were the first to coin the phrase “to make money.” Men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity, she noted in “The Meaning of Money,” published in For the New Intellectual (1961), […]
The nuclear treaty with Russia is separate from America’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran and North Korea.
Simply printing money to pay off its creditors in a debased currency is no solution for Greece’s financial troubles.
Government monopolies cause food shortages and shopping frenzies in Venezuela.
How an otherwise tempered remark by the president spawns a media fury, left and right.
With capitalism under persecution and “Wall Street greed” continually blamed for plunging the world economy into financial crisis, many bankers rather keep a low profile these days in order to avoid the crowds and pitchforks. Jamie Dimon, CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co., however, is no stranger to the political arena and several […]
St Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania has announced its intention to stop hiring smokers, stating that it hopes to improve the health of its workforce and reduce medical costs. This May, the hospital starts screening prospective employees for nicotine use. Those testing positive will be precluded from the process. St Luke’s is not the first […]
“Regulated markets work best.” The words are coming from Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. After all, “we have traffic lights too,” he argued on Fox Business this Monday. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was set up as an independent government agency in the 1970s with the stated goal of protecting […]
