Goldman's Consent Decreee. Here is the consent decreee that Goldman Sachs agreed to in order to settle the SEC's suit. In it, the company does not admit or deny the allegations (standard wording) but does admit that it made "a mistake." Well, we knew that. If I take a walk on the bad side of town and get mugged, clearly I made a mistake. Goldman's "mistake" was to do something that provoked the SEC to mug it. Still, for the reasons I laid out here , I wish Goldman had fought the SEC in court. By capitulating, Goldman allows the SEC and the Obama administration more broadly to start taking us back to the mid-20th century era of feudalistic capitalism, under which companies are forced to act as the caring seigneurs of all their "stakeholders."And as for Goldman's attempt to preserve the distinction between committing a "mistake" and committing an immorality: naturally, it was quickly brushed aside by anti-capitalists such as the viciously anti-business Senator Carl Levin .
On July 12, The Washington Post ran a fascinating interview with Mark Thornton, Senior Vice President, Product Development, and Chief Medical Officer at Novavax. Inspiringly, the story was headlined “A career built on bringing livesaving drugs to the market and to patients.” And, for the most part, Thornton’s career is every bit as admirable as the headline makes it sound. “In college,” he tells us, “I fell in love with the notion of correcting a disease and making a person better by giving them a pharmaceutical.” And he ends the interview by commenting: “At Novavax, I can help bring these products to the marketplace and to patients.”
Hang your clothes on a hickory limb / But don't go near the water. That seems to be the message of Rep. Henry Waxman's bill to limit the conditions under which a person may drill for oil. According to Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Waxman restriction is simply that the would-be driller first accomplish the impossible. After that, he may go right ahead.
On June 24, the Supreme Court ordered the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago to reconsider the conviction of Conrad Black in light of the high court's rulinig in the “honest services” decision in Skilling v. United States . Predictably, the prosecutors in Black's case are arguing that he should not be free on bail while his appeal is being heard.
The Washington Post today offered those few of us unwilling to read the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill a cartoon summary of what it all means: “Reinventing Financial Regulation,” by Brady Dennis and Alberto Cuadra. It is not entirely clear to me who did the text and who did the graphics. But the essence of the Consumer Protection provision is clearly stated (and illustrated): “In the lead up to the financial crisis, seven regulators shared responsibility for looking out for consumers of mortgages, credit cards, and other such loans, but none treated consumers as a top priority.”
Richard Scrushy, former HealthSouth Corp. chairman, today filed a motion with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, seeking to be released from prison while the court reconsiders his 2006 conviction, as the Supreme Court ordered it to do following the high court’s “honest services” decision.
“Waterboarding” is a controversial procedure in which interrogators compel a target to cooperate by making him feel as though he is dying—specifically, by making him feel that he is drowning. I am not convinced that it amounts to torture, or that its use against Islamic jihadists is wrong. But I am convinced that U.S. prosecutors have devised a metaphorical form of waterboarding, which they regularly employ against innocent businessmen. They have discovered a means by which they can convince a businessman who is not even suspected of a crime that his company—to which he may have devoted his life—will be killed if he does not cooperate with them. And that, I think, is wrong.
The ever-stalwart Tom Kirkendall, of Houston’s Clear Thinkers, writes today about the plight of former Merrill Lynch executive James Brown , one of the last Enron figures still pursued by our Javert-like Department of Justice (sic). My own take on Enron, now, is that it involved some financial fraud, notably by Andy Fastow and a couple of his cronies, but that it also involved what Rob Bradley has called “philosophical fraud” and I have called postmodernism . Under the circumstances, I think we need to say of its dubious but non-frauduent practices something similar to what ACLU types often say of disagreeable speakers: “I disagree entirely with the way you conduct your business, but I shall defend to the death your right to conduct it as you see fit.” The invaluable Professor St
According to Eric Dash’s article in the NYT ( “A Film That Explores Humanity on Wall Street” ), Kevin Spacey has a new Wall Street film coming out: “Margin Call.” The headline is taken from Spacey’s comment: “I am trying to humanize bankers.” But Dash opens his article with the remark “Finding humanity on Wall Street, some might say, can be a little like finding a good mortgage in a bundle of C.D.O’s. Traders, after all, tend to pride themselves on their dispassionate objectivity.” Notice how exactly backwards that is. Subprime mortgages were precisely those based not on “objectivity” but on “humanity.”
The New York Times headline the other day was utterly predictable in its class-warfare connotations: "Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich." Indeed, it was so predictable that I confess I did not even try to read through the story (by David Streifeld, who formerly covered the adversary culture for the Washington Post) to find out how the statistics had been manipulated to yield to the desired result. Fortunately, someone else did.
May 2002-- On December 2, 2001, Enron Corporation filed for bankruptcy. With the company's assets then estimated at $62 billion, it was the
For the last 200 or 300 years, collectivists of various stripes have been screaming that we must protect people from free markets. Well, I am beginning to see their point. Except that I turn it around: We must protect markets from people. Consider: If we suddenly declared that minors, of any age, had to be allowed to enter into whatever bargains and contracts they wished, would we not simultaneously restrict markets severely in order to prevent those minors from hurting themselves?
Spitzer Insurance case is tossed. More on this to come , but it seems that one of the cases launched against insurers by Eliot Spitzer way back when he was New York’s attorney general has finally been thrown out. It has taken five years. Can you imagine what these men have gone through during that time? I do not yet know the particulars of the case, but here was my article on Spitzer’s Reign of Terror .
The Department of Justice (sic) has admitted that, as part of a 2007 “deferred prosecution agreement” it entered into with Amex, former
Muhammad Yunus, who founded Bangladesh's Grameen Bank in 1983, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his promotion of micro-financing, and..
AIG. Was Joe Cassano of AIG “the man who crashed the world” as Michael Lewis proclaimed , and as other anti-capitalists such as Gretchen
According to a report at Securities Docket : “In Ireland, an official at the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement, the country’s corporate watchdog, acknowledged that no one prosecuted for white-collar crime by the ODCE has been jailed in the 10-year history of the office.”
Here is an absoutely fascinating, if completly obtuse, article by the leftist WaPo columnist Ezra Klein . What is both fascinating, and obtuse, about Klein's column is its utter obliviousness to the nature of power. The ideal bureaucrat, in Klein’s view, is a scientific person indifferent to material wealth who wants only the ability to institute his judgments, independent of public favor or commercial concerns.
KaluginWASHINGTON, D.C. July 9, 2010 — In the mid-1960s the Soviets planted a "sleeper" agent in Washington, D.C. whose main "job" was to "
Two Government Defeats in Securities Cases. I wrote recently on the SEC’s defeat in the Rorech and Negrim case (alleging insider trading) and I briefly mentioned the Bristol-Myers case . Peter J. Henning, who writes about white-collar cases for the NYT (and is a professor of law at Wayne State University Law School) discusses both cases in this column: “Two More Setbacks in Securities Fraud Cases.”
Goldman's Consent Decreee. Here is the consent decreee that Goldman Sachs agreed to in order to settle the SEC's suit. In it, the company does not admit or deny the allegations (standard wording) but does admit that it made "a mistake." Well, we knew that. If I take a walk on the bad side of town and get mugged, clearly I made a mistake. Goldman's "mistake" was to do something that provoked the SEC to mug it. Still, for the reasons I laid out here , I wish Goldman had fought the SEC in court. By capitulating, Goldman allows the SEC and the Obama administration more broadly to start taking us back to the mid-20th century era of feudalistic capitalism, under which companies are forced to act as the caring seigneurs of all their "stakeholders."And as for Goldman's attempt to preserve the distinction between committing a "mistake" and committing an immorality: naturally, it was quickly brushed aside by anti-capitalists such as the viciously anti-business Senator Carl Levin .
On July 12, The Washington Post ran a fascinating interview with Mark Thornton, Senior Vice President, Product Development, and Chief Medical Officer at Novavax. Inspiringly, the story was headlined “A career built on bringing livesaving drugs to the market and to patients.” And, for the most part, Thornton’s career is every bit as admirable as the headline makes it sound. “In college,” he tells us, “I fell in love with the notion of correcting a disease and making a person better by giving them a pharmaceutical.” And he ends the interview by commenting: “At Novavax, I can help bring these products to the marketplace and to patients.”
Hang your clothes on a hickory limb / But don't go near the water. That seems to be the message of Rep. Henry Waxman's bill to limit the conditions under which a person may drill for oil. According to Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Waxman restriction is simply that the would-be driller first accomplish the impossible. After that, he may go right ahead.
On June 24, the Supreme Court ordered the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago to reconsider the conviction of Conrad Black in light of the high court's rulinig in the “honest services” decision in Skilling v. United States . Predictably, the prosecutors in Black's case are arguing that he should not be free on bail while his appeal is being heard.
The Washington Post today offered those few of us unwilling to read the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill a cartoon summary of what it all means: “Reinventing Financial Regulation,” by Brady Dennis and Alberto Cuadra. It is not entirely clear to me who did the text and who did the graphics. But the essence of the Consumer Protection provision is clearly stated (and illustrated): “In the lead up to the financial crisis, seven regulators shared responsibility for looking out for consumers of mortgages, credit cards, and other such loans, but none treated consumers as a top priority.”
Richard Scrushy, former HealthSouth Corp. chairman, today filed a motion with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, seeking to be released from prison while the court reconsiders his 2006 conviction, as the Supreme Court ordered it to do following the high court’s “honest services” decision.
“Waterboarding” is a controversial procedure in which interrogators compel a target to cooperate by making him feel as though he is dying—specifically, by making him feel that he is drowning. I am not convinced that it amounts to torture, or that its use against Islamic jihadists is wrong. But I am convinced that U.S. prosecutors have devised a metaphorical form of waterboarding, which they regularly employ against innocent businessmen. They have discovered a means by which they can convince a businessman who is not even suspected of a crime that his company—to which he may have devoted his life—will be killed if he does not cooperate with them. And that, I think, is wrong.
The ever-stalwart Tom Kirkendall, of Houston’s Clear Thinkers, writes today about the plight of former Merrill Lynch executive James Brown , one of the last Enron figures still pursued by our Javert-like Department of Justice (sic). My own take on Enron, now, is that it involved some financial fraud, notably by Andy Fastow and a couple of his cronies, but that it also involved what Rob Bradley has called “philosophical fraud” and I have called postmodernism . Under the circumstances, I think we need to say of its dubious but non-frauduent practices something similar to what ACLU types often say of disagreeable speakers: “I disagree entirely with the way you conduct your business, but I shall defend to the death your right to conduct it as you see fit.” The invaluable Professor St
According to Eric Dash’s article in the NYT ( “A Film That Explores Humanity on Wall Street” ), Kevin Spacey has a new Wall Street film coming out: “Margin Call.” The headline is taken from Spacey’s comment: “I am trying to humanize bankers.” But Dash opens his article with the remark “Finding humanity on Wall Street, some might say, can be a little like finding a good mortgage in a bundle of C.D.O’s. Traders, after all, tend to pride themselves on their dispassionate objectivity.” Notice how exactly backwards that is. Subprime mortgages were precisely those based not on “objectivity” but on “humanity.”
The New York Times headline the other day was utterly predictable in its class-warfare connotations: "Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich." Indeed, it was so predictable that I confess I did not even try to read through the story (by David Streifeld, who formerly covered the adversary culture for the Washington Post) to find out how the statistics had been manipulated to yield to the desired result. Fortunately, someone else did.
May 2002-- On December 2, 2001, Enron Corporation filed for bankruptcy. With the company's assets then estimated at $62 billion, it was the
For the last 200 or 300 years, collectivists of various stripes have been screaming that we must protect people from free markets. Well, I am beginning to see their point. Except that I turn it around: We must protect markets from people. Consider: If we suddenly declared that minors, of any age, had to be allowed to enter into whatever bargains and contracts they wished, would we not simultaneously restrict markets severely in order to prevent those minors from hurting themselves?
Spitzer Insurance case is tossed. More on this to come , but it seems that one of the cases launched against insurers by Eliot Spitzer way back when he was New York’s attorney general has finally been thrown out. It has taken five years. Can you imagine what these men have gone through during that time? I do not yet know the particulars of the case, but here was my article on Spitzer’s Reign of Terror .
The Department of Justice (sic) has admitted that, as part of a 2007 “deferred prosecution agreement” it entered into with Amex, former
Muhammad Yunus, who founded Bangladesh's Grameen Bank in 1983, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his promotion of micro-financing, and..
AIG. Was Joe Cassano of AIG “the man who crashed the world” as Michael Lewis proclaimed , and as other anti-capitalists such as Gretchen
According to a report at Securities Docket : “In Ireland, an official at the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement, the country’s corporate watchdog, acknowledged that no one prosecuted for white-collar crime by the ODCE has been jailed in the 10-year history of the office.”
Here is an absoutely fascinating, if completly obtuse, article by the leftist WaPo columnist Ezra Klein . What is both fascinating, and obtuse, about Klein's column is its utter obliviousness to the nature of power. The ideal bureaucrat, in Klein’s view, is a scientific person indifferent to material wealth who wants only the ability to institute his judgments, independent of public favor or commercial concerns.
KaluginWASHINGTON, D.C. July 9, 2010 — In the mid-1960s the Soviets planted a "sleeper" agent in Washington, D.C. whose main "job" was to "
Two Government Defeats in Securities Cases. I wrote recently on the SEC’s defeat in the Rorech and Negrim case (alleging insider trading) and I briefly mentioned the Bristol-Myers case . Peter J. Henning, who writes about white-collar cases for the NYT (and is a professor of law at Wayne State University Law School) discusses both cases in this column: “Two More Setbacks in Securities Fraud Cases.”