Free Republic

Perhaps the most startling discovery of the WikiLeaks dumps so far didn't come from the most recent emails surrounding the various Hillary scandals, though there are many great ones, but from 2008 when John Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team.  The email came from Michael Froman, a former Citibank executive, who single-handedly built the entire cabinet of what was supposed to be the "main street" President.     The email in question was even sent from Froman's Citibank email address (rookie!) and includes "A list of African American, Latino and Asian American candidates, broken down by...

Individual investors see a steady stream of paeans to Wall Street, praising not only the substantial resources of professional investors but also suggesting (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) that these professionals are smarter and more capable than the average investor. While there are certainly plenty of columns out there decrying the mistakes of professional investors and pointing out that disciplined individuals can do just as well, the fact remains that the financial media overwhelmingly tilt toward the idea that Wall Street is smarter than you or me. But is it really? The word "smart" has plenty of definitions, but Wall Street...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Investors are having doubts about banks' profit reports and wondering whether their better-than-expected performance mask larger problems with bad debt. Stocks fell sharply early Monday as investors sold financial stocks and locked in profits after a six-week rally. The major indexes slid more than 2.5 percent, including the Dow Jones industrial average, which fell 200 points. Worries about the financial industry overshadowed Oracle Corp.'s announcement that it would acquire Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.4 billion and a $6 billion bid by PepsiCo Inc. to buy its two biggest bottlers. The news came at the start of...

Derivatives consultant Janet Tavakoli is onto something. In a note to her clients, she says the biggest Ponzi scheme of all may be the one that brought the world financial markets to its knees. That’s the scheme that united Wall Street bankers with mortgage lenders in a bid to funnel more and more money into the market for supbrime homes loans. She says packaging of iffy home loans into securitized bonds that could be sold to insitutional investors—many of them relying on borrowed money—was a system born to fail. “The largest Ponzi scheme in the history of capital markets is...

Let any bad thing befall the United States of America and its people, and you pretty much count on a cheering section to emerge. Yes, Osama Bin Ladin, “Pooty-Poot” and Ahmadinejad all enjoy watching Americans dying in lakes of fire and blood. Also, and much more obnoxiously, so does much of Western Europe. Not that we haven’t ever given up blood and treasure to pull their sorry butts out of perdition. The latest gaggle of gloating goatees celebrates the hardships afflicting Wall Street during the recent failures of America’s investment industry. To observe European investment bankers watching Wall Street’s latest...

Last week, a mob of screeching protesters invaded the Bear Stearns headquarters in Manhattan demanding more aid for homeowners. As you know, I oppose federal bailouts of every make and model — and that includes both the Bear Stearns deal and the bipartisan stimulus-palooza in Washington. But the bank-bashers who held their demonstration in New York City against Bear Stearns and JPMorgan are totally unhinged. And out of control. Here is the face of the entitlement culture gone mad: "We will go to their neighborhood, we will educate their children on what their parents do. They should be ashamed," said...

STARTLED BY A RAPIDLY WORSENING liquidity crunch at Bear Stearns, the stock market fell Friday in a broad wave of selling as investors worried anew about the severity and spread of the credit rot. The crisis of confidence at the nation's fifth-largest investment bank, where customers were demanding their money back, mirrored the crippling anxiety spreading through the markets: The cost of protecting investment banks' debt against defaults increased. Shares of merger targets slipped further below offer prices amid fear about the unwinding of arbitrage positions. Emerging-market assets skidded. Investors rushed to hedge in the option market. That the New...