Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008, one of the hotly debated topics was whether the mortgage banking industry as a whole made systematically bad business decisions because they looked to be profitable, or because the government made them do it. The first study out the gate to claim the government made them do it was flawed in ( Read more... )

One of the odder ideas I've seen in the news lately, is that there is currently a bubble in the bond market. I strongly suspect this is the result of folks who either misunderstand what a bond is, or what a bubble is; interestingly five years ago, many of them were assuring us a housing bubble was impossible ( Read more... )

Do you remember the General Motors bankruptcy? In bankruptcy court, the stuff that GM thought had value was kept, and the company was taken private. The remainder -- unprofitable factories, pension liabilities that seemed like good ideas years ago, and so on -- went into a publicly traded firm, currently known as Motors Liquidation Company. As of ( Read more... )

One of the financial cornerstones of the Right's news/entertainment industry has been ads for gold. Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Smerconish, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Miller, Fred Thompson, G. Gordon Liddy, Lars Larson, Brian Kilmeade, and Andrew Napolitano are all pushing gold on their news/entertainment shows. If ( Read more... )

Today, President Obama announced that some offshore areas that President Bush had kept closed to oil drilling will be opened. To celebrate, it seems that Wall Street bid up the price of the entire oil industry (while just about everything else went down ( Read more... )

. . . except, perhaps, to point and laugh mockingly. OK, this is probably reason number 3,000 or so:

As CNBC “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer predicted - if it [health care overhaul] passes, get ready to see a sell-off on Wall Street.

So, did Wall Street have a sell-off today?


( Read more... )

One of the things I've learned (often the hard way), is that there are often things that the management of a company did, that they don't want the investment community to know they did. An awful lot of those things, they're required by law to specify, largely because investors got ticked at other companies which did the same sorts of things, and ( Read more... )

So, I was reading the investment news over at Morningstar. Now, most of the time, I successfully ignore the banner ads I get as a "freeloader" who doesn't pay them a subscription; when I look, they're trying to convince me to move my investments to another brokerage, or buy a car that costs as much as my home did, or for a manufacturer of ( Read more... )

After spending all week feeding .qif files to GnuCash, I've found out why the bulk job I did Sunday blew up. One of those files is apparently corrupted; it's failed to load on three separate attempts so far ( Read more... )

So, when I was doing my taxes a week ago, I noticed that I had quite a lot of cash in my stockbroker's account. As in, about double what I thought I had. I filed it as a mystery to solve later and got on with life ( Read more... )