“I’ve been renting homes for 15 years and I’ve never had a landlord be this ridiculous about getting stuff repaired,” said Henry Cecil, who moved into a four-bedroom house in Winter Haven, Fla., owned by Invitation Homes in March. Invitation Homes is an arm of Blackstone, the largest private equity firm in the world. The…

Read on →

Chef Walter Staib is the immigrant from the Black Forest and his famous City Tavern at 2nd and Walnut, where we are talking, was closed as part of the federal shutdown of sanity. It didn’t matter that not a single federal employee is among his 80 workers, almost all of whom lost pay for 10…

Read on →

Amid this preoccupation with numbers, however, one figure keeps getting overlooked: the U.S. trade deficit. Each of these indicators affects the economy in different ways. But the trade deficit’s thoroughgoing neglect is especially strange. For its size and impact are comparable to its higher profile counterparts and bigger than some. And its growth has directly…

Read on →

David Stockman, former head of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, a former member of Congress, and author of The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism, insists the shutdown is a “sideshow.” He tells The Daily Ticker the real story is the debt ceiling, and he thinks we’re “finally getting to a…

Read on →

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, discuss whether banking bonus outrage is equivalent to the lynching of African Americans in the Deep South and the money, money, money, MONEY! of the ex-Presidents of the United States. In the second half, Max interviews George Galloway, a Member of Parliament, about…

Read on →

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, discuss the US Federal Reserve Bank as ‘the greatest hedge fund’ in history and ask whether or not their quantitative easing policy is like trying to pass pork off as a prime cut of beef. In the second half, Max interviews precious metals…

Read on →

Keiser Report: Deja Fraud (E497) – YouTube. In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, report from the heart of hedge fund land in Stamford and Darien, Connecticut, where they discuss the deja fraud of highly leveraged markets five years after Lehman collapsed and the nonsense job economy in which highly…

Read on →

FORTUNE — I told myself I wasn’t going to do a “Lehman” column given the media frenzy over this month’s five-year anniversary of that institution’s bankruptcy. But in researching a new book I am writing for young adults about the 2008 financial crisis, I have been uncomfortably reminded of the hardship so many families encountered…

Read on →