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...Complex systems are prone to catastrophic failure. Have we come to embrace policies and values that increase the odds of failure?
Read more...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...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...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...The official report on the October 15, 2014 “Flash Crash” raises some questions which unfortunately it does not answer.
Read more...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...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...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 flags a new stunning bit of bank propaganda, that risk is an unavoidable natural condition that is futile for regulators to control.
Read more...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...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...An integrated regulatory approach with a common leverage ratio for debt-based financing across the financial system would prevent bubbles
Read more...This tidbit from HSBC reveals a new low in the standards of banking, which given how low those already are, amounts to an accomplishment of sorts. Perhaps we should create a Stuart Gulliver Award for other instances of creative extreme seaminess. Nominees?
Read more...The European Central Bank has just launched full-fledged quantitative easing. This column argues that the ECB’s watershed decision highlights both the strengths and the persistent vulnerabilities of the Eurozone. The limited-risk-sharing provision flags the need for greater fiscal union; and governments should use the respite that QE provides to launch much-needed structural reforms.
That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
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