That’s one of the subplots of Big Money, by Politico reporter Kenneth Vogel, a book that I reviewed for yesterday’s issue of the New York Times Book Review. You can read that review, so I won’t re-review it here, except …
In an earlier paper (blog post here), I argued that corporate political contributions can in many cases be challenged by shareholders as conflicted transactions that further insiders’ personal interests (e.g., lower individual income taxes) rather than the…
It’s highly misleading to talk about the government’s positive nominal return as a good thing without evaluating it the way you evaluate any other investment.
If Larry Summers evaluates his own investments that way, then he should find someone else to manage his money.
one of my closing points is about the plethora of banking crimes/scandals/whoopsies that we’ve seen in the past few years
Today my daughter’s combined first and second grade class wrote down their individual wishes for the world. The wishes are part of a wish tree. Here they are: I wish people could always be happy. I wish…
Over the years, Tim Geithner has come in for a lot of well-deserved criticism… Obama took particular pains to stand behind Geithner throughout his term as treasury secretary. Whom should we blame for that?
Levitin did a good job using the books as a starting point for a discussion of the incentives problem in financial regulation: the problem that regulators have stronger incentives to favor the industry than to defend the public interest.
Credit Suisse’s guilty plea to a charge of tax fraud seems to be a major step forward for a Justice Department that was satisfied both before and after the financial crisis with toothless deferred prosecution agreements and large-sounding fines that were easily absorbed as a cost of doing business. A criminal conviction certainly sounds good, and I agree that it’s better than not a criminal conviction. But what does it mean at the end of the day?
A couple of weeks go I wrote an op-ed about a proposal in Connecticut to create a new tax-preferred retirement plan that would, by default, include almost all workers who don’t currently have access to an employment-based plan (like a 401(k)).
