Market Talk

I remember the first time I saw “Star Wars” like it was yesterday, even though it was the summer of 1977. Every kid who saw the movie that summer does. There’d never been anything like it before. It even blew away Star Trek reruns. Everybody I knew wanted to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker and every girl wanted to be Princess Leia. Maybe some real contrarians wanted to be Darth Vader, but nobody wanted to be one of those nameless Imperial soldiers in those vaguely Nazi-like uniforms.

According to Josh Brown, though, that’s exactly what we are.

Brown, over at the Reformed Broker, aligns the financial blogosphere into the Star Wars universe in his now-annual rundown. Seeing as who employs us, we were put into the “Death Star” group, along with Floyd Norris, MarketBeat, Alphaville and the Curious Capitalist. It’s all the mainstream media players, basically. Okay, I get it. But that makes us the bad guys.

We should be happy just to have made the list. We didn’t make last year’s version. And I’m certainly not going to quit my job just to be with the cool kids in the Rebel Alliance group, where Brown, ahem!, puts himself. But I never imagined myself as the kind of guy who’d sneer “you rebel scum.”

But, hey, if I only knew the power of the Dark Side.

"I'm about to get medieval on your..."

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s reported tongue-lashing at financial regulators over the faltering regulatory overhaul plan likely won’t have a major impact.

WSJ says Geithner went on an “expletive-laced critique” last Friday against regulators who are concerned with giving the Fed too much power to regulate the financial system. From the Journal:

Friday’s roughly hourlong meeting was described as unusual, not only because of Mr. Geithner’s repeated use of obscenities, but because of the aggressive posture he took with officials from federal agencies generally considered independent of the White House. Mr. Geithner reminded attendees that the administration and Congress set policy, not the regulatory agencies.

It’s difficult to determine what Geithner’s tirade actually accomplished. Legislators from both parties seem skeptical about enhancing the Fed’s power, so yelling at regulators such as FDIC chair Sheila Bair or SEC chair Mary Schapiro essentially shows only “catharsis on Geithner’s part,” The Economist’s Free Exchange blog says.

“Perhaps this is a calculated meltdown and leak, designed to convey the impression that the administration is serious about pushing regulatory reform and ‘angry’ about delay,” blog says.

Continue reading…