Wolf Richter: IBM Discloses SEC Investigation, Plunges to Worst Level since 2010, Even Share Buybacks Don’t Work Anymore
IBM discovers that financial engineering bites back.
Read more...Category Archives: Moral hazard
Former California Official Blasts CalPERS CEO Anne Stausboll, Staff, and Board for Misconduct
Former California official Tony Butka He deems Chief Investment Officer, Ted Eliopoulos, the head of private equity, Réal Desorchers, and private equity professional Christine Gogan to have been so dishonest with the board that they all have should have received a notice of intent to discharge.
Read more...CalPERS, an Anatomy of Capture by Private Equity
One of the strongest, most consistent reactions of experts who watched the video of the last meeting of CalPERS’ Investment Committee was that the staff and the Investment Committee members, save JJ Jelincic, were completely captured by the private equity industry.
Read more...“How Complex Systems Fail”
Complex systems are prone to catastrophic failure. Have we come to embrace policies and values that increase the odds of failure?
Read more...A Pragmatic Approach to External Debt: The Write-Down of Germany’s Debts in 1953
Greece’s crisis has invited comparisons to the 1953 London Debt Agreement, which ended a long period of German default on external debt. Unfortunately for Greece, the motivations driving the 1953 agreement are nearly entirely absent today.
Read more...Entering the Nuclear Age, Body by Body The Nagasaki Experience
I felt I had not adequately commemorated the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and am putting up this offering to make up for that lapse.
Read more...Libor Trader Sentenced to 14 Years for Market Manipulation. So What About His Bosses?
While it’s gratifying to see former UBS trader Tom Hayes go to jail for large-scale Libor bid rigging, his bosses had to have known what he was up to. So when will we see their indictments?
Read more...Perry Mehrling: Flash Crash Explained by HFT
The official report on the October 15, 2014 “Flash Crash” raises some questions which unfortunately it does not answer.
Read more...How Pension Funds, Universities and Endowments Pay for Private Equity Private Jets
One of the class markers of the private equity industry is that its members routinely fly on private jets. That’s because the larger and even some of the smaller firms charge their private jet travel to private equity portfolio companies.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Microsoft Tallies the True Costs of the M&A Boom: Layoffs, Write-Offs, Shut-Downs, and Economic Decline
Microsoft illustrates the real-world fallout of letting corporate executives, either out of desperation or out of finding deal making more fun than the grind of making businesses perform better, follow the siren song of M&A mavens.
Read more...What If There is No Deal on Greece?
The alarming part of the deadlock between Greece and its lenders is the lack of a plan on the creditor side to develop a Plan B, a sort of mirror image of the Greek government’s claim that its has bet everything on securing a favorable agreement.
Read more...Bill Black: Geithner’s Ghost Writer and the Parable of the River of Risk
Bill Black flags a new stunning bit of bank propaganda, that risk is an unavoidable natural condition that is futile for regulators to control.
Read more...Bill Black: Sorkin on the Street’s Surge of Suicides – Ignoring the Obvious
Predictably, it never occurred to Andrew Ross Sorkin that being put in impossible ethical positions could be a cause of some of of Wall Street’s recent suicides.
Read more...Memo to Readers: If You Want to Beat Big Finance, You Need to Be Able to Take the Fight to Their Terrain
We are now 35 years into a finance-led counterrevolution. If you care about income inequality, student loan debt slavery, foreclosure abuses, and other products of the success of this effort, it behooves you, as Sun Tzu urged, to understand your enemy.
Read more...A Unifying Approach to Preventing Asset Price Bubbles
An integrated regulatory approach with a common leverage ratio for debt-based financing across the financial system would prevent bubbles
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