Wall St. & Banks
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Control Rights (And Wrongs) | The Browser
Dear Friend of The Browser, Usually we point you towards great things to read elsewhere. Today we'd like to detain you here for a couple of minutes. We've got some news of our own. You can choose between three types of annual membership, starting at $12.99 (or £8.50) a year. The features they support, and the differences between them, are explained in more detail here .It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame. Clive R. Boddy , most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”
Did Psychopaths Take Over Wall Street Asylum?: William D. Cohan - Bloomberg
Idea in Brief American capitalism has been transformed over the past three decades by the idea that financial markets are suited to measuring performance and structuring compensation. Stock-based pay for corporate executives and high-powered incentive contracts for investment managers have dramatically altered incentives on both sides of the capital market.
The Incentive Bubble - Harvard Business Review
Wall Street Confesses to Bonus Culture’s Ills: William D. Cohan - Bloomberg
Imagine if you could hear directly, albeit anonymously, from the normally secretive bankers and traders who manufactured and sold the trillions of dollars in toxic debt securities that pushed the world’s financial system to the brink of disaster in 2008. William D. Cohan is the author of the recently released "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and the New York Times bestsellers "House of Cards" and "The Last Tycoons." Well, you can find the answer to that question in “Conversations With Wall Street,” a compact -- and largely overlooked -- book by Peter Ressler and Monika Mitchell published last year by FastPencil Premiere, in Campbell, California . Ressler and Mitchell worked together at a Wall Street executive search firm that specialized in finding senior people for fixed-income trading departments.
Should Some Bankers Be Prosecuted? by Jeff Madrick and Frank Partnoy | The New York Review of Books
Brian Zak/Sipa/AP Images Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, and Al Sharpton at the Cooper Union, where President Barack Obama was giving a speech on financial regulation, New York City, April 22, 2010 More than three years have passed since the old-line investment bank Lehman Brothers stunned the financial markets by filing for bankruptcy. Several federal government programs have since tried to rescue the financial system: the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Federal Reserve’s aggressive expansion of credit, and President Obama’s additional $800 billion stimulus in 2009. But it is now apparent that these programs were not sufficient to create the conditions for a full economic recovery. Today, the unemployment rate remains above 9 percent, and the annual rate of economic growth has slipped to roughly 1 percent during the last six months.A pair of University of Chicago law professors say the federal government needs to regulate new financial products the same way it tests new drugs for safety Roadside Attractions Jeremy Irons captured a new Wall Street's moral ambiguity in the 2011 film "Margin Call" when his fictional chief executive lectured his investment bank staff on the three ways to make money. "Be smarter.
The Case for Treating Big Finance Like Big Pharma - James Warren - Business - The Atlantic
Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space WASHINGTON, DC – Among the fundamental principles of any functioning justice system is the following: Don’t lie to a judge or falsify documents submitted to a court, or you will go to jail.
"Too Big to Jail" by Simon Johnson | Project Syndicate
The Big Lie - The Daily Beast
Imagine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere. A terrible scene, made worse by the sound of distant laughter, because somehow, on the heights commanding the dead zone, the officers’ club has made it through intact. From its balconies flutter bunting, and across the blasted landscape there comes a chorus of hearty male voices in counterpoint to the wheedling of cadres of wheel-greasers, the click of betting chips, the orotund declamations of a visiting congressional delegation: in sum, the celebratory hullabaloo of a class of people that has sent entire nations off to perish but whose only concern right now is whether the ’11 is ready to drink and who’ll see to tipping the servants.“When I was in Norway one of the Norwegian politicians sat next to me at a dinner and said, “You know, there’s one good thing that President Obama has done that we never anticipated in Europe. He’s shown the Europeans that we can never depend upon America again. There’s no president, no matter how good he sounds, no matter what he promises, we’re never again going to believe the patter talk of an American President. Mr.
Wall Street’s Euthanasia of Industry | Michael Hudson
A Giant Among Giants - By Ken Silverstein | Foreign Policy
What the IPO filing did not make clear was just how Glencore, founded four decades ago by Marc Rich, a defiant friend of dictators and spies who later became one of the world's richest fugitives, achieved this kind of global dominance. The answer -- pieced together for this article over a year of reporting that included numerous interviews with past and current Glencore employees and a review of leaked corporate records, dossiers prepared by private investigative firms, court documents, and various international investigations -- is at once simpler and far more complicated than it appears. Like all traders, Glencore makes its money at the margins, but Glencore, even more so than its competitors, profits by working in the globe's most marginal business regions and often, investigators have found, at the margins of what is legal.Heist of the century: Wall Street's role in the financial crisis | Business
Wall Street bankers could have averted the global financial crisis, so why didn't they? In this exclusive extract from his book Inside Job, Charles Ferguson argues that they should be prosecuted Bernard L Madoff ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, operating it for 30 years and causing cash losses of $19.5bn. Shortly after the scheme collapsed and Madoff confessed in 2008, evidence began to surface that for years, major banks had suspected he was a fraud. None of them reported their suspicions to the authorities, and several banks decided to make money from him without, of course, risking any of their own funds. Theories about his fraud varied.An Excerpt From “Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies Are Destroying Open Markets”—By Barry C. Lynn (Harper's Magazine)
By Barry C. Lynn Barry C. Lynn is the author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction. He directs the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative at the New America Foundation.Davos Newbies » Blog Archive » A few truths about Davos
It’s the time of year when everywhere I turn, I read tweets and posts about Davos 1 , which was a huge part of my life for ten years. I’m a long way from the mountain top these days, but I find that too many people don’t understand some basic truths about the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum. 2 The Forum’s mission The Forum’s often-stated mission is “Committed to Improving the State of the World”.Held Hostage | The Browser
Writing Worth Reading On the Kafkaesque regulation of payments companies in America. Academic paper. Sub-title gets point across neatly: "How the Banking Sector Has Distorted Financial Regulation and Destroyed Technological Progress" Read full articleIN his influential 1975 book Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff , Arthur Okun argued that pursuing equality can reduce efficiency (the total output produced with given resources). The late Yale University and Brookings Institution economist said that not only can more equal distribution of incomes reduce incentives to work and invest, but the efforts to redistribute—through such mechanisms as the tax code and minimum wages—can themselves be costly. Okun likened these mechanisms to a “leaky bucket.” Some of the resources transferred from rich to poor “will simply disappear in transit, so the poor will not receive all the money that is taken from the rich”—the result of administrative costs and disincentives to work for both those who pay taxes and those who receive transfers.