I’m guessing that the Lords of Wall Street aren’t particularly interested in anything the protesters have to say, unless they have a cool tip on a new way to make obscene amounts of money by spinning off esoteric derivatives, insider trading, or taking the economy to the brink and getting billions in bailout money, all [...]

  First Hurricane Irene flooding the Northeast, then wild fires consuming the Southwest, and now THIS. 

Funny, you’d think Wally Piper’s classic children’s book, The Little Engine That Could, would have been a rich source for cartoon metaphors, but I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever used it. The tragic oddity of the economic recovery now well underway is how few people are yet benefitting from it. Wall [...]

Financial reform actually passed. Another victory for Obama, despite the furious objection of the other party and their Wall Street masters. Much too late, of course, and not strong enough, but at least they’re turning the Titanic slowly away from the deregulatory daze that got us into this mess in the first place. That’s little [...]

The one most important thing that almost everyone agreed that financial reform HAD to do was to break up the “too big to fail” banks, so that we taxpayers wouldn’t be forced to bail them out again if Wall Street continued its reckless ways. So, of course, that was the one thing the financial reform [...]

Surprise! It looks as though the lobbyists are going to win again. The long-delayed financial reform bill is finally taking shape, with a vastly weakened Volcker rule, which would have kept banks from investing their own money in risky bets on the market, and would have prohibited them from owning hedge funds and private equity [...]

One of the basic sci-fi dystopian plots came true yesterday, as computer -generated trading apparently took control of the stock market and nearly crashed it. More and more trading is done according to complex programs developed for highly sophisticated computers, which can analyze data and make trades faster than we poor, limited humans can. The [...]

What a difference a year makes, especially when the economy is bad. The independents, who went so heavily for Obama in 2008, swung back the other way in New Jersey and Virginia. The experts are mixed on whether this is an early sign of weakness for the Democrats or whether it’s the usual dissatisfaction with [...]

The closer we get to economic recovery, the more difficult it’s going to be to reform Wall Street. Congress has already dithered for almost a year, and still no substantial reforms of the practices that led to the economic meltdown have emerged. For all Obama’s lecturing of the miscreants, he’s done little to force them [...]