Working Life

Well, this is just more of the same. Shareholders and customers pay the tab for greed and incompetence–and the Administration goes along. A new deal–but no one held responsible.

Read the full story

   I love it when billionaires feel misunderstood. It sounds something like this: “I’ve fleeced you or just piled up gobs of money at your expense but, gee, that really wasn’t personal, I’m really a good guy with all the right motives, if you could just see it my way because, well, my way is […]

Read the full story

    In my search to find something positive among the rubbish cascading across our eyes, let us behold a small ray of positive action. Citibank’s CEO Vikram S. Pandit tried to stuff his pockets full of millions of dollars more in bank money. The shareholders were not buying it–and turned thumbs down on his proposed […]

Read the full story

   Pardon me while I yawn. The measly fine that Citigroup is paying to settle civil complaints charging that the bank defrauded investors is really something else: it’s a stay-out-of-jail, keep-your-reputation card for Robert Rubin and a lot of other senior Citi officials, past and present. Instead, this deal–as was true with the miniscule fines […]

Read the full story

   Oh, no. Here we go again. We’ll have to endure yet another round of Clinton nostalgia: In the book, titled “Back to Work,” Mr. Clinton will make the case for why government matters, explaining his ideas on energy, job creation and financial responsibility, his publisher said Thursday.    You mean we’re going to get […]

Read the full story

  Every day that passes, I get the sense that the people who run the big banks are even more brazen in their view that we, the people of the country, are just sharecroppers on their financial plantations. We work, we give–and they take and take…and, then, when they are done with us, we get […]

Read the full story

   There are days when I would just rather be a sports reporter. Today is one of those days. Sports news repeats itself–but every day there is a new twist. Scores may be the same–but how a baseball game ended up 3-2 will always have a different make-up.     Not politics, though–or at least the […]

Read the full story

    I’ve maintained for a long time that the civil fines levied against Goldman Sachs ($550 million) and J.P. Morgan ($153 million) for their roles in the financial crisis scam amounted to peanuts–costs that will be ultimately passed on to consumers and shareholders. If a financial executive could aid and abet a massive fraud and […]

Read the full story

   Every day, there is a new joke about the economy–though, the joke is a cruel one on most normal people and unfortunately, the transcribers of the news (nee "journalists") don’t get the jokes largely because they are (a) really dumb and/or (b) don’t really care and/or (c) are so wrapped up in being "serious" […]

Read the full story

    This is so absurd it made be burst out laughing in the midst of a sip of coffee this morning–and fittingly the coffee splashed over the idiotic front-page article in The New York Times (yes, I still read the actual paper version) that hails the newest words from the mountaintop, wisdom passed down from […]

Read the full story