Working Life

When I come back in my next life, I want to be a banker or a hotshot on Wall Street. Because it’s the kind of work where you can do anything you want, break any laws, never get punished and make a huge amount of money. And the best thing is: you make someone else pay for your fuck-ups. That is the upshot of the settlement reached today with the banks. Another day, another sham.

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   Over the past few months, I’ve written a number of pieces about the ludicrous spectacle of anyone taking Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s seriously anymore. When S&P downgraded the U.S. rating, it underscored how entirely corrupt the system has become.     Joy and celebration: maybe S&P even broke the law.  The investigation is […]

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    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 […]

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   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" […]

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    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 […]

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   Via The Wall Street Journal today: Federal prosecutors, working with securities regulators, are conducting a preliminary criminal probe into whether several major Wall Street banks misled investors about their roles in mortgage-bond deals, according to a person familiar with the matter. The banks under early-stage criminal scrutiny—J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Deutsche […]

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  This is a story that seems all too familiar, but it’s worth repeating each time it happens: trillions of dollars in retirement and savings are gone, millions of jobs will be lost, we’re facing a severe economic crisis that could go on for a number of years, and we could be in for a […]

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    Readers of this blog know that I have been pointing out for a long time that the majority of Americans have been in recession for a long time–it was partly masked by the housing bubble, which allowed a lot of people to pull out a whole bunch of cash from almost under the mattress […]

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    This morning, Sen. Obama is scheduled to give a major address on the economy. Yours truly is scheduled to appear on CNBC’s "Power Lunch" (hey, I didn’t come up with the name) at 1:20 p.m. (Eastern Time). I may not have a chance to post the entire speech here before the CNBC gig but […]

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    Yesterday, I observed the bizarre proposal by Sen. Clinton to hand over fixing the economic mess we’re in to the very people who helped create the mess (well, actually, for most workers we’ve been in an economic mess for a very long time–but you’all know that). I wasn’t trying to pick on Sen. Clinton […]

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