“It does gall you. Just because we're a little bitty county doesn't mean we don't need a bank. It wasn't our fault." -- Hazel Bedingfield, 79, who now travels 24 miles for her Social Security payment at her new bank You deposit your paycheck on Friday and can’t get money out on ...read more

Investors often assume dangerous, unnecessary risks by owning stocks on the basis of sloppy economic and financial analysis. For each stock you own, you should frequently reassess the reasons for owning it. Also, you need to remain on the lookout for signals that the future operating environment for a particular ...read more

What am I missing? Why do the majority of folks blindly accept the shenanigans of the federal government? Why is it advisable to bail out the failures and penalize the productive? Isn’t there a moral hazard lurking somewhere in this mix? In a recent editorial, Peter Schiff reminded me of what ...read more

The debate rages on over how to do proper accounting for financial institutions. After each major debacle, there is a stampede to some other method. Maybe the chronic problem is the ongoing assumption of modern accounting that every security has an instantaneous value based on its expected revenue and its ...read more

Something like a week remains before General Motors is reduced to lunchmeat on industrial-capital's All-You-Can-Eat buffet spread. The wish is that its deconstructed pieces will re-organize into a "lean, mean machine" for producing "cars that Americans want to buy," and that, by extension, the American Dream of a Happy Motoring ...read more

The Great Wish across America is to resume the life of comfort-and-convenience that seemed so nirvana-like just a few short years ago, when the very constellations of the heavens might have been renamed after heroic Atlanta realtors and Connecticut hedge fund warriors, and the boomer portfolios groaned with earnings, and ...read more

Welcome to Maiden Lane, where the tripe vendors of Wall Street hawk their wares. Maiden Lane runs right past the foot of the N.Y. Fed, and this address hosts the most poisonous assets on its balance sheet. As any anti-Fed Reservist among you will agree, the Reserve’s balance sheet is nothing but ...read more

Rumor has it that times are tough for Manhattan’s “girlfriend elite.” Now that investment banking, proprietary trading and various other seven-figure Wall Street professions are losing a digit or two, funding is drying up for high-maintenance, extra-marital relationships. During the go-go days (and nights) of the late nineties and early aughts, Manhattan’s ...read more

For the first time since the Enron debacle, Americans finally joined hands to hate something worthwhile. Instead of worrying about the Ten Commandments on a courthouse’s steps or a Super Bowl halftime show’s costume malfunction, we had a legitimate outcry from America’s poorest 95%. AIG was greedy and people got ...read more

Down, down, down they go. But are stocks cheap as we begin the first week of March? "They are cheap looking back," says our friend Eric Fry in California, "but they still might be VERY expensive looking forward." Ah yes, the future. What does it hold? Well, apparently more lay-offs and ...read more