When I started this website, one goal was that it would have was an active comments section where savvy, engaged readers would debate the information presented in the and relates matters. I don’t know how it came abut, but the Naked Capitalism commentariat embodies that aspiration even more than I dared hope.
This community is more important than you might imagine. It is more than just a resource for sharing information. It has become a place where we work together to understand how the our economic and social structures are being hollowed out to serve the interests of the top wealthy and their well-placed minions.
In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, it was obvious what had happened. The bailouts were the greatest transfer of wealth in history. Simon Johnson called it a quiet coup by financiers. But as the ripples of that shock continue to fan out, it takes more effort to connect the dots on longer and longer causal chains to understand the forces that are driving this unravelling, to understand finance as it has come to be constituted as a drive of injustice, as a device for predation and looting on a mass basis. We come together to document its progress, to validate the experience of the victims and do what we can in our small way to help, and to identify leverage points.
It is not obvious how to break the stranglehold of elite financiers. But remaining ignorant about how they operate guarantees that they will be able to improve upon their already advantaged position. You can have an impact on the banking front, in ways small and large, from warning friends and colleagues about the dangers of various borrowing and investment products, to writing regulators about why you are opposed to yet more concessions to a bloated financial services industry. This is a front where citizens like you can take ground back, but only if you go to the effort to arm yourself with information. .
And readers understand and value the role we play in this effort. From reader TarheelDem:
The combination of clear explanation of how the technical aspects of finance affect social justice and environmental aspects of public policy are why I continue to check out the articles and links on the this site. And post them through Facebook to friends who have worked in banking who would not otherwise encounter them and friends who are outside the FIRE sector who need the translation of the finance mumbo-jumbo to understand national issues. I continue to be thankful for the work that Yves and Lambert do here.
I was educated in English literature and adult education. When the financial crisis hit, I wondered about the details of what went wrong and started reading and commenting on various blogs. At one point, I was asked to compile daily articles in a blog based on one bank’s fraudulent behaviour which helped me understand that institution. One of the links on that blog was to NC and I began to read it every day.
I know more about how finance works, about derivatives, and about MMT than I thought I could ever absorb….I have the greatest admiration for those who continue to slog away at presenting the truth and revealing all the lies that define the financial industry worldwide. Please continue to present your financial analyses and I will read them and continue to learn.
From reader HotFlash:
My dear Yves and Lambert,
I read the wonky posts very slowly, as I have to look up much and ponder more and try to work out how this actually works, that is, who is in the room with whom and who are giving each other high fives. After two years steady reading, including several re-readings of Econned, much of it is still way over my head, but I understand better what is happening and how. And even a bit of why, and am finding to my delight and astonishment that I can even predict a bit. I am encouraged that so many smart, knowledgeable people also think that the system is rotten to the core and can cite specifics, name names and draw the exploded diagrams. In short, I don’t have much to add to the financial posts, but there is much I take away. Thank you both.
There are puppets and there are puppetmasters. Politics and the people who play them are merely the puppets. Finance/economics is/are the puppetmasters. At the end of the day all anybody wants is the money; then they buy all the politicians they want. And, imo, there was a decision that a strong middle class was a threat to the 1% and they’ve been chipping away at it for 30 years (or more). Give us economic justice and there will be more social justice.
As Matt Stoller wrote in 2012:
When the bailouts came, I recognized the discourse immediately as identical to the foreign policy discussions prior to the Iraq war. I had experienced the doomsday prophecies already, the various establishment organs lying to push policy. But I didn’t understand the details, how to think about the banking system. Naked Capitalism helped provide both the quality content and the confidence of a group to that problem….
Naked Capitalism, like Occupy Wall Street, is a threat to the establishment. I wrote of Occupy as a “Church of Dissent”, because it was a space, a place where people could come together to build a different narrative about our society. Right now, Occupy is embarrassing the government through its phenomenal work serving the victims of Sandy, while also showing that a different way of organizing our social resources is possible. And that too is what Naked Capitalism and this community really has done, for financially oriented elites. Yves has created, through tireless (and I do mean tireless) work, a credible place to discuss the shape of the world that is being created…
This is a key step in building the new world we know is coming. It’s to get us, together, to talk to each other, learn from each other, and recognize that mobilizing our collective intellectual honesty is the only way we will get there. Naked Capitalism is a community. Yves is obsessed with listening to your comments, to your emails, to your thoughts and ideas. And she genuinely cares, to an extent I’ve never seen, about getting every single detail on the policy right. I pretty much know that if it’s on this site, it’s probably correct.
This is essential for taking on an elite gone mad. When every institutional power center is leaning on every policymaker to push more carbon into the atmosphere, to cut social programs for all of us, to ratchet up the war machine, to empower the TBTF banks, dissent becomes more and more difficult. But the irony is that it is times like these when the system is weak, when the lies become even more important. Naked Capitalism is the antidote. It isn’t the whole solution, obviously. But do not underestimate the importance of having a consistent top quality community discussing financial regulations, politics and economics with social justice as the goal. This stuff is actionable, it can and sometimes does turn into policy.
We are working together to create a new world that is more humane, that is more just, and that we can be proud of. While that may seem like an unachievable ambition, in the early 1970s, when a small group of extreme right-wingers mapped out a plan to make American values and institutions subservient to the interests of big business, their goals also seemed unrealistic. Radical social change is possible and one of the requirements form making it happen is having audacious goals.
We hope you’ll support our efforts. There are multiple ways to give. The first is here on the blog, the Tip Jar, which takes you to PayPal. There you can use a debit card, a credit card or a PayPal account (the charge will be in the name of Aurora Advisors).
You can also send a check (or multiple post dated checks, if you want to spread out payments) in the name of Aurora Advisors Incorporated to
Aurora Advisors Incorporated
903 Park Avenue, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10075
Please also send an e-mail to yves@nakedcapitalism.com with the headline “Check is in the mail” (and just the $ en route in the message) so we can count your contribution in the total number of donations.
Thanks again for your readership and support!
41 comments
Comments are closed.
Love to see you troll for money, as it helps keep you honest. …but please stop emailing me for contributions.
I’m sorry that you don’t like the e-mails, but they are actually normal for organizations that fundraise. We’ve been late to turn to them.
You didn’t give us a valid e-mail address when you posted this comment. So you asked us to act on your behalf yet made it impossible for us to do so.
However, each e-mail has an unsubscribe button on the bottom, so you can take care of this yourself.
Yves – Since you seem to be watching comments at the moment, I have a question. Are you having issues with the recent comments column on the right? The new format showed up for me in the first few posts after you announced it, but then reverted to the old format.
Thank you for all your work and that of your associates.
Do people other than commenters pay attention to comments sections? I’ve wondered about this for some time.
Absolutely. Although I don’t usually feel qualified to add anything (which doesn’t stop many on the internet, I know), I spend as much time or more looking at the comments as at the posts. I think that’s likely true for many readers. And as others have said, the quality of the discourse in the comments is a big part of the value of the site (and is indicative of the quality of the posts).
Absolutely. In fact, there are many more “lurkers” quietly reading comments than comment writers.
I don’t have the numbers for NC, but back in the day when I was at Eschaton, less then 2% of unique visitors commented.
Ben, never commented before and have been reading Naked Capitalism for two years: no need to wonder any more.
Yes. The comments are sometime more important to me. If I’m already aware of a ‘situation’. Yves explains things clearly – then the commentary fleshes out the concepts. More than once I’ve had my preconceptions altered and more often reinforced. I always like to read comments on articles that have appeared elswhere.
I’m one the poorly educated in financial matters which leaves me doubting my own opinions. Especially when evil things seem so obvious to me. I think “I must be crazy to believe….”
Then, hey howdy, here it is. My sanity reconfirmed!
I only comment on my own situation – unsourced.
Yves, I don’t have much disposable income, can I send you a couple a dozen farm fresh eggs from my FARMette?
Here’s an idea, Faye: maybe you could sell those farm fresh eggs (sound scrumptious!) locally and send the dough to Yves. Fan of the U.S. Postal Service that I am, I still can’t imagine mailing fresh eggs. And with my suggestion, you don’t have to pay for shipping, either.
People who continually doubt and challenge their own assumptions make for the very best thinkers. Keep it up.
I read most posts but comment only occasionally, and most of those are brief. When it comes to my writing, the line that has been variously attributed to Mark Twain and a Victorian era woman whose name I don’t remember applies: “I apologize for writing such a long letter, but I did not have time to write a short one.”
I do read as much of the comment threads as I can find time for however because I find them fascinating on a number of levels. Commenters who are deeply informed on the subject of a post often add a lot of pertinent information. But what I find truly intriguing is how the views of some specific comment submitters have visibly evolved over time. There are several folks who I recall first came on board spouting right wing talking points but who over time have become much more nuanced in their offerings. I think this is an example of the positive effect that Naked Capitalism’s discussion threads can have.
Sent in a check at the start of the pledge period, Yves.
But again, things like this…
“Naked Capitalism, like Occupy Wall Street, is a threat to the establishment.”
…are precisely why it’s crucial for you to move to default https with all due alacrity.
Here’s a nice refresher from this week about why the principal technologist at the ACLU has been pushing so hard for this. (And pretty much every other infosec specialist is on the same page. Ed Snowden is on the record agreeing as well.)
Protect both your readers and your commenters from prying eyes! It should incur incredibly minimal cost and incredibly minimal one-time hassle on your end. Please? Pretty please? It’s the right thing to do.
I’d recommend you get ‘HTTPS everywhere’ it is a program my tech savy friend set up when he protected my computer. Also Sandboxie (invaluable), PeerBlock as well. use TOR if you are concerned. At the end of the day they are gonna get in, but you can make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible for them. Have had more done to my computer but way over my head. Take care.
If there is any interest, I will get from my friend a complete list of measures and precautions to take. It would be a pleasure to be able to contribute to this community in that way. Please let me know. Caution: it will make you paranoid when you realize how often you are being probed by these organizations.
“I’d recommend you get ‘HTTPS everywhere’ it is a program my tech savy friend set up when he protected my computer. Also Sandboxie (invaluable), PeerBlock as well. use TOR if you are concerned. At the end of the day they are gonna get in, but you can make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible for them. Have had more done to my computer but way over my head. Take care.”
None of those measures your friend set up will do anything to protect either the fact that you read Naked Capitalism or the comments you post here from being mass collected and aggregated with your identity, both by government and private entities. (The measures your friend set up may have different beneficial effects, but that’s another topic,)
OTOH, by essentially just flipping a switch to enable default https, (and purchasing a cheap SSL certificate), Yves has the power to instantly protect all of her readers from surveillance, mass collection, and aggregation. If we are to believe both the Snowden docs, and the principal technologist of the ACLU, this simple measure actually works. Your identity, and all of our identities, by just clicking here is made blind to surveillance. Your identity, and all of our identities, by posting a comment here is made blind to surveillance.
This seems incredibly important to me for a blog that has the potential to “threaten the establishment”. Your 1st Amendment rights can be actually secured by a site that enables default https. (At least in the limited context of that site.)
(TOR, while excellent in theory, has some issues in practice, and may well be compromised to the point where it does not provide anonymity. We really don’t know. Further, by merely using TOR, you instantly mark yourself for special surveillance by the NSA, and give up your assumed status as a ‘US Person’, which theoretically provides you with some meager legal protection. Finally, setting up, using, and maintaing TOR is a rather complicated burden on each and every reader of Naked Capitalism, while moving to default https is an incredibly minor burden on Yves that automatically provides privacy to all readers and commenters on her blog.)
Thanks for the update, still new to this. Read an interesting article http://www.alexaobrien.com/secondsight/wb/binney.html recently. Hope Yves responds to you.
“Hope Yves responds to you.”
I’m grateful that Yves did respond to me a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I don’t think she grasped the issue at all.
I’m going to keep hammering on the issue both because I think it’s very important, and because I think Yves will fully agree with me once she does grasp the issue, which I feel sure she will.
Feel free to bring it up yourself too. The twitter account of @soghoian is an excellent resource for learning more about the compelling case for default https on sites like this.
(In a very positive development this week, the chief technologist for the New York Times pledged to go default https by the end of 2015, and urged all other news/media sites to take the same pledge. The reasons it’s going to take a commercial site like the NYT so long is that they’ve got to co-ordinate with multiple 3rd party ad networks, some of which don’t currently support https. But I’m assuming Yves doesn’t have that problem, since she didn’t bring it up in her response to me.)
Ignorance of the law is no excuse and does not get you a pass. So it is with finance. Unfortunately, ignorance is what masters of the finance universe expects from us.
Here in Europe, people who have the temerity to break from the austerity line are riduculed and are driven out of town. When they can’t be moved out they are assaulted with bigoted comments. We have people believing the German line: the reason periphery nations are where they are economically is because they are lazy and profligate. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We definitely could use more discussion on European austerity that links to individual lives. We have too many hidebound austerians drown out counter arguments. TINA.
“It is not obvious how to break the stranglehold of elite financiers.”
It is clear how not to do so. Do not introduce (continental European style) legally mandated, centralized bargaining here — you know; the kind of labor market where Walmart cannot effectively void all middle class labor contracts of all retail employees everywhere by paying their employees much less (also French-Canadian style, also Argentinian and Indonesian) .
The kind of labor market set up that automatically teams up equal (through universal unions) financing and lobbying with 99% of the votes. David Broder, late dean of the DC press corps said that when he came to Washington all the lobbyists were union.
It seems ultra clear how not to do it.
Denis, could you discuss this in more detail. I am not familiar w/European, Canadian, Argentinian, & Indonesian labor unions/contracts.
Just sat back and watched Tommy Tiernans (a Irish comedian) latest tour of eurotrashland.
He went to Europe without a script .
Because he did not have a product to sell – what he was giving could not be consumed.
It was more then a bit educational .
The extremely linear thought process of the audience was seen in stark relief.
Tommy the comedian was much more comfortable with the dead air of silence then the audience.
Whats striking to the last few dozen irish people who remain is how alien the rest of the world truely is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Air
I think history is pretty compelling. There is no such result as social justice. Attempts at creating social justice resulted in 70 million dead in China (thanks, Mao), 40 million dead in the Soviet Union (thanks, Josef) and over 80 million dead as the result of world war two (thanks, Benito and Adolph). All in the name of social justice for their people. Slave labor camps are a bonus.
Throughout history, social justice has been used for one thing – the ability and power to control others’ lives.
Social justice is a farce. I’ll take capitalism.
No, there is no such thing as utopia. It is the belief in utopia that kills people.
Social justice is an ideal, such as equality, fraternity, and world peace. It has never been achieved; does that mean we should strop striving for it, and accept all wrongs as inevitable? Slavery? Genocide? That is nihilism.
Do you not bathe, because you’ll just get dirty again?
Excellent point. Yes, that’s the lesson of the 20th Century: No utopias. (Including, I might add, Galt’s Gulch, crazy pants glibertarian islands, or Mars.)
On the list of slaughters, one might also add the Atlantic Slave Trade, definitely a capitalist affair. I remember, and am too lazy to go find, a bar chart of Great Slaughters in History. I think the Irish potato famine, another capitalist affair, was too small to be listed, however. The Great Slaughers not to be restricted to any one system of political economy, and go back for millenia (Genghis Khan, IIRC).
History shows that the people who became capitalists had to fight for social justice against the aristocrats of their day. They won but today are imposing their own aristocracy. The fight goes on.
Wouldn’t that be a great course – a study of the people sacrificed on the altar of capitalism over the ages?
Then again, maybe not – The converted won’t want to read a litany of suffering and worse; the choir won’t want to read “propaganda.”
“70 million dead in China (thanks, Mao), 40 million dead in the Soviet Union (thanks, Josef) and over 80 million dead as the result of world war two (thanks, Benito and Adolph). All in the name of social justice…”
uh, other factors here. In the name of social justice? Just as so much harm the US has done in the name of freedom and democracy.
Great blog. Learned a lot. Links to issues I have a separate interest in. I enjoy the comments.
Am astounded at the amount of work that goes into NC.
Yves is better than the Dept. of Justice, the SEC, the OCC, and the FED, according to Crazyman, at exposing fraud. Is it really an accomplishment be better than the Dept. of Justice, et. al. in exposing fraud? Crazyman needs a more demanding standard. It feels good knowing there are people out there are thinking about things I think about and consider important. Amazes me daily, how intelligent, educated people, of liberal spirit are ignorant and unstudied about what is happening in the world, how power works, and rely upon MSM. So, NC is a fresh breeze on a hot day. NC has sent forced me to lean numerous acronyms. I now annoy friends who don’t know what I am referring to with my new vocabulary.
A girl in the audience asked
“Whats going on ”
Second girl
“tell us a story”
First girl
“I paid for a babysitter for a hour” (Time is precious in this manic world of running hither and thither )
They find it impossible to remain still.
Afterwards a organisational girl thinks the comedy man is having a breakdown when in fact he is trying to become more adjusted to the present reality.
He later talks about the history of Victorian mental hospitals in Ireland during a very hard money period.
It required just one signiture before a person was committed.
Obviously during such a hard money period there was monetary pressure to lock up people who appeared not quite normal in the artificial glasshouse of the time that was defined as natural by the establishment.
A mainly Irish expat audience working inside Zurichs financial warrens got so rough because they were not getting “the product” that the man had to revert to normal programming.
People were then comfortable again with the rythm of wam bam consumption that they settled again.
They could again absorb the product.
A dutch man at another event – “could you pick up the pace if you want us to stick around”
Tommy :” friend there is no pace to pick up……………
If you don’t want to stick around…..”
Dutchman : “But we are not going to leave.”
Tommy ; “So just relax then something funny will come up – don’t worry”
Queen & Physician
The empire is run by barren, bitter old women, and their eunuchs, those with the most to gain in an artificial world separating humanity from nature, who employ their daughters as damsels in distress, to imprison as many males as possible to the cause. Family Law is a prison without physical walls, doing you the favor of distilling them all into a closed VAT, and you out.
The physician empiricists see the derivative and assume it is life, stroking their own egos, keeping it alive by replicating bits and pieces of nature to serve as the necessary drugs, for which they are paid in other people’s debt, and increasingly their own.
GDP simply measures the human activity employed in the process of growing the prison, for which the old woman’s bank is more than happy to print the money, backed by whatever mythology the majority will accept, issuing it to the critters willingly trading life for an ever-growing mortgage on the future, to ensure the status quo, until its inevitable collapse.
Only the brain-dead zombies failed to notice that the empire was strangling natural male employment with conservation easements and replacing it with compliance make-work in the City, shipping natural resources to the global cities for ever-growing control over so-collapsing local communities, expecting nature to replenish itself indefinitely, for infinite rounds of the same.
What those kids hiding in the basement fail to recognize is that there is always another bitter, barren old woman and her physician waiting to take over for the last, to employ the same puppets to the same end, growing the gatekeepers, creating war and protesting war, as an economy, to expunge non-compliance.
The market share of government and its debt is no accident, republican and democrat alike. Whether it’s a virus, a volcano or a vacuum of labor that wipes them all out is of no concern to labor, which has much better things to do than babysit the old woman’s puppets.
In and of itself, the old woman’s economy can only provide inelastic , downward mobility, lost purchasing power hidden by inflation, critters competing for ever-shrinking tiles on a path of diminishing return. Now, when it’s far too late, the critters find out that Social Security and Medicare are leaving them subject to the Law of the Street, like all government promises, subject to the whim of gatekeepers, so they go back to work, to extend the status quo, locking their own children out of gainful employment, surprise.
And we watch, as the upper middle class, bred for the purpose, finds itself exposed, to its own stupidity. Putin is simply the first, out of the box, hoping to escape the imploding gravity. It is the beginning and the end that you care about, the circuit from and to nature. What the critters do with what they steal is beyond your control, and, in any case, they only destroy themselves, so long as you ignore the damsel in distress, the artificial emergencies the State creates for the purpose, of your internment.
Funny, the critters want to tell me when to wake up and when to sleep, when to go to the bathroom and when to eat, what I should do for a living and who I should support, while they try to convince themselves that I am the one with the problem, when the empire has nothing I want. I appear to be alone, but am not, and never fail to surprise the gatekeepers, who always expect a different outcome.
No one can keep up with 20% rent inflation, not even the Queen, not with all her gatekeepers, and not with all her Ph.D.s, or even an organization of Ph.D. gatekeepers. Pay that City Manager just as much as you want, to breed out freedom, with government grants. An animal in a box destroys itself every time, and being last to lose is no conciliation.
Freedom is a matter of perspective. Develop your own and the empire, which replaces real demand with artificial demand, to supply its supply-side economy, disappears. My great sin was training young women to act accordingly, with a university built for the purpose, of which the Internet is a distant derivative, in the past.
Keep trying to fix those planes, trains and automobiles without labor, expecting something other than a virus, that cannot get out of its own way, consuming everything, including itself. When I walk into that building, you can answer my questions, get out of the way, and pay the bill, or you can have an elevator that goes up, down and changes speed at the same time, before it falls, just like the rest of the new world order, same as the old world order. The choice is yours.
Empires and everything in them are contraptions, trapping their own designers. Consult the Founding Fathers, physician empiricists, all you like. If Galileo was an empiricist, the world would still be flat and the Church of Time would still be molesting boys ensuring more of the same.
Demanding that I employ an office full of compliance officers, and seek majority vote before beginning the work, is not the answer, unless you want more of the same.
Mmmm. Maybe it is just me, but what? ;)
Excellent comments as always, but I groked Eve’s post as a last ditch, or next to the last ditch pitch to meet the fund raising goal. As understood it, this was a week long project and it’s now after one in the morning Monday, my time (Norway) and it doesn’t look to me like the last goal, the now name changed R&R goal has any chance of being met.
Yves, I’ll tell you what worked for me – donating to Naked Capitaltism. What didn’t work is one goal after another. I coughed up twice and then the third goal popped up and boing – a fourth. I was already wondering by the third goal how many goals there were going to be – and that did something with my head. To your disadvantage, I think.
My humble suggestion is that next time you tell us how much you want to raise and how many donors you think you need to meet the goal. As for me, you don’t have to justify it, you don’t have to break it down. I’ve been following this blog for five years or so, (second comment) and have donated the last two or three I know what you’re about. You decide where you need to spend the money.
Thanks, and thanks! I am sorry you do not like our approach, but this is how we have conducted our fundraiser for each of the last four years. It provides vastly more transparency to contributors as to why we need money and the estimated level of expenditure than any other organization I know of provides. I do appreciate very much that you gave more than once, but that was not the intent of the multiple goals. A very high proportion of our readers fires up NC first thing in the morning to read the news at the start of their day. They have to get to work. It’s not a great time for people to go to PayPal or sit down and write a check. So as most fundraisers do, we ask multiple times, in multiple ways.
We made it clear from the outset that that was how the fundraiser worked, in our kickoff post. And we reinforced that numerous ways: by the blurb on the top of each post that referred to “current goal” and to the announcements when we met each goal, such as “Met Our First Target, on to the Second”. We told readers from the beginning, and repeatedly during the fundraiser, how it works.
“The stranglehold of elite financiers” that you mention can be broken by either accumulating more financial muscle than they have, which is inconceivable, or by repudiating their credit notes entirely and using something else which they cannot have a majority of.
It has been the case for two centuries, since the present economic model was entrenched on the world by Britain after European / American resistance was defeated in the Napoleonic War and War of 1812.
Over that period we have seen the limited liability of business established and we have seen the creation of deniable ownership through nominee companies by the legislative assertion that a company is the same as a person. Most recently we have seen value removed from the currency.
The latest and greatest concessions are being made now (the TTP / TTIP treaties) to allow government to withdraw from economic and commercial regulation of its people and leave the field to the merchants themselves, a reversion to the ‘yankee trader’ days of 19th century with application not solely to international trade as in those days but to every commercial activity.
These new concessions are being extorted from representative government by merchants. Their ability to do so flows from the international nature of their activities whilst governments act only nationally. This ability has enabled them to decide whether to pay or not pay tax and has put them in the driving seat. It appears to evidence that its our credit-note money system we want entrenched on the world, nothing else i.e. we are not really fussed about ideology.
Government will then become the instrument of the merchants in applying force to recalcitrant countries. That is happening at the moment in the Muslim world due to the ideological difference about God’s instruction to Moses. The Muslims say God was right; we say we have been disobeying for half a millennia so if it was important, He would have said something by now. Once the Muslims have been brought to recognise their belief is too literal, we can all proceed to make wealth in a harmonious and hopeful world. I believe that is the Fed’s vision of the future.
I read comments & this is my first post.
I really like NC. I kept waking up with this jackboot in my face, so I naturally went in search of the causes of this phenomenon. NC has helped to confirm some of my suspicions, and debunked some too. What’s not to love? We have our lovely hostess, the awesome resource of Links, and Lamberts water cooler.
Is there ever, has there ever been, a conflict of interest between the excellent work done here on the blog, Naked Capitalism, and the work and interests of the clientele at Aurora Advisors,Inc. ? I have wondered for a long time and just thought to ask.
http://auroraadvisors.com/our_clients.htm
If you look at the client list, most of them are dead institutions (for instance, the work I did for Lehman was on the international side of their business in the later 1990s. I was in no way, shape or form involved in any US strategies). I last did work for Soros Fund Management in 1993.
This site is a more than a full time job. And do you think writing posts that savage big banks on a regular basis is a great business development strategy if I wanted to get financial institution consulting clients? Or similarly, that shooting at private equity is a smart way to get hired by PE firms?
Thank You kindly for your reply. I have no idea, nor ever had any idea, if ever any persons or instituations might approach or ever had approached your company that a conflict of interests might arise.
Thank You for the good work that you do.
I nominate Banger for 2014 Commenter of the Year.
That stuff helps raise donations, right?