Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

How We Got Here, and Why We’re Not Getting Out, in One Paragraph

The NYT pretends that the Cuomo/Rattner battle is about personalities, but briefly let’s the mask slip: Neither side seems willing to budge, each insisting he is the wronged party: the attorney general feels deceived and affronted, and the Wall Street money manager feels persecuted for conduct he views as standard business practice. “‘Feels’ deceived and […]

Flashback: How Donald Luskin Earned His Title

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, […]

Obama Administration Foolishness, Part 2

I took a couple of days to let life interfere with blogging, but none of the standard politics/economics bloggers seems to have highlighted this note from the Lex column of last Wednesday’s (13 October 2010) FT (again, no link; feel free to provide in comments) under the heading “Defence M&A”: Lockheed has two small services […]

I Was Wondering When This Would Come Down

Tom Bozzo A fund of fund(s) that funneled money into the Madoff scam is in Big Trouble: Massachusetts regulators have sued the Fairfield Greenwich Group, one of the earliest of these so-called feeder fund managers, for fraud, saying it had repeatedly misled investors about how diligently it checked out Mr. Madoff’s operations over the years. […]