by Linda Beale Hedge Fund Tax Avoidance Schemes–using (purported) offshore reinsurers It seems that billionaires think they are entitled to it all and think they should be able to run their speculative games without paying much of anything at all in taxes to the government they depend on. And none of this is good for […]

Max Sawicky, on his Twitter feed, sends us to this classic piece from Donald Luskin Believe me, if we raise taxes on hedge-fund managers we’ll get fewer hedge-fund managers. Today, with lots of hedge-fund managers trading all the time and keeping markets efficient, stocks are at record highs around the globe and markets are deeper, […]

Via Felix, we discover Joe Nocera at the NYT reporting that securitization professionals are not as stupid as they would have had us believe: What [the FDIC] has discovered, said [Michael H. Krimminger, the F.D.I.C.’s special adviser to the chairman for policy], is that the contracts are rarely as constricting as investors and servicers have […]

Late to the party, but FelixMatthew Malone (via The Divine Bess) quotes from Andrew Lahde’s good-bye letter, the follow-up to the one in which he noted that he only plays fair games, and the Fed is currently rigging the roulette wheel, so he’s taking his 800%+ return from last year and going home. This ‘graf […]

This will teach them, right? H.R. 6377 directs CFTC to use all its authority, including its emergency powers, immediately to curb the role of excessive speculation in the energy and swaps futures markets and take other corrective actions as necessary to eliminate any market disturbance that prevents energy markets from accurately reflecting the forces of […]

Rick Newman of Useless News and World Report busts some myths. And gets to the heart of the “speculators” issue: Many companies, for instance, want to lock in the price they’re going to pay down the road for petroleum products and other supplies they need to run their businesses. So they make agreements with suppliers […]