There’s a really interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal about Romney’s tax return. It describes how the carried interest tax rate paid by Romney could be problematic. Carried interest income is a special type of income category claimed by people who manage venture capital and other investment activities. It’s paid to compensate them for their work in making and supervising investments. The tax rate | Read More »
The latest about MF Global. Immediately after the bankruptcy, the trustee for the bankruptcy sold $2 billion of Italian government bonds to JP Morgan and George Soros. Today we learn that the trustee sold these assets AT A 5% DISCOUNT to the market value of those bonds at the time of the sale. The bonds were trading for 94% of their face value when the | Read More »
Do scandals matter? Well, the House of Representatives has changed parties twice in the last fifty years- in 1994 and in 2006. It’s useful to note that both times, scandal involving leaders of the party controlling the House played a major role in the change. 1994 The 1994 scandal was really a combination of two scandals, the House Post Office scandal and the House | Read More »
You know, it’s about the $1 billion + (exact amount still unknown) that Corzine stole from client funds at MF Global. The scandal that Republicans prefer to ignore… 1. The Agriculture Committee in the House has called Corzine to testify. Meanwhile any committees with anything to do with finance are doing nothing. 2. The CFTC yesterday finally passed rules regarding brokerage company use of funds, | Read More »
One explanation for where the missing $600 million of customer funds held by MF Global went is that MF needed the money to collateralize its bad bets on European sovereign debt. There is another, bigger, example of similar misuse of customer funds, perpetrated with the knowledge and consent of the Obama administration. The Federal Reserve recently allowed Bank of America to transfer $75 TRILLION of | Read More »
Time for my weekly rant about Corzine, Obama and MF Global. Reminder- MF Global, led by Obama best bud John Corzine, not only went bankrupt, but it took with it $600 million of client funds which were not its property. In the real world we’d call that theft, but Washington Democrats ignore it and Washington Republicans…. ignore it too. This could be the issue that | Read More »
I wrote last week about how Republicans have a golden issue to (properly) tie the Obama administration to the Wall Street shenanigans, and to demonstrate that our financial problems are not problems of capitalism, but rather are problems of enforcement and Democrat corruption. It’s been in the news that MF Global may have “borrowed” (better words are “fraudulently misappropriated” or just “stolen”) about $600 million | Read More »
To highlight the differences between nice-guy Republicans and tough-guy Democrats, take a look at Exhibit A, the differing treatments by the press and pols of Ken Lay versus John Corzine. Ken Lay, you may recall, was the CEO of Enron, originally a Texas pipeline company and later principally a producer of arcane financial products whose function was to hide the stupid investments of Enron management. | Read More »
Wake up, Republicans! It’s understandable that there’s a tough, high stakes race for the Presidential nomination right now. But to both the candidates and bloggers, I suggest that you simply press Cain to get the facts out, and spend most of your time focusing on the really big issues/opportunities in front of you now. First of all, this internecine warfare is going to harm whoever | Read More »
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is soliciting bids to build a system to monitor not only blogs and newspaper articles about it, but also even conversations on Facebook and Twitter. The Fed wants to “identify and reach out” to bloggers and influencers. And what? Send us to the Gulag?? Where’s the ACLU when we really need it? For that matter, where’s Congress? Here | Read More »
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