What the heck is this “Quantitative Easing” thing central banks around the world keep talking about? Maybe you’ve heard the U.S. Federal Reserve is talking about doing a third “QE” but you still don’t know what that is, except that it hasn’t yet healed the economy. Well, these two Brits offer one explanation that is easy to understand. Just don’t try this at home. You could be arrested for counterfeiting.
Archive for July, 2012
Maybe America isn’t such a bad place to pay taxes after all.
The number of Americans renouncing their U.S. citizenship took a steep drop in the second quarter. Click here to read the details as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
As renunciations spiked in previous quarters, many observers attributed the increase to tax laws. Earlier this year, I profiled a man who renounced because of the tax burden the U.S. places on citizens living abroad. Click here to read it on MarketWatch.
Also, click here to read my previous take on the topic: “Tax Dodgers Are Proudly Un-Amercian.”
When the father of the too-big-to-fail bank suddenly announces that it’s time to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, it’s probably time to break them up.
In what will go down in history of a classic example of “Now, he tells us,” former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill told CNBC the big banks should be broken up so that they do not impose additional risks on taxpayers. Citigroup, which he built through a series of mergers, required a $45 billion bailout from the federal government.
Weill’s comments are just more proof that even bankers are getting sick of banks. Or maybe they are just beginning to realize that they will be more valuable in pieces.
Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.
We’ve long purchased most of our oil from foreign countries, and now it looks like we’re going to be getting our solar panels from China.
Heavily subsidized Chinese solar panel makers have been dumping solar panels on the global market below cost, swiftly running U.S. manufacturers out of business.
Colorado venture capitalist John Hill, however, says that is only part of the story for the bankruptcy filing of Loveland, Colo.-based Abound Solar. Hill says the company he helped found was done in by election-year politics, and the perception that Abound was just “another Solyndra.”
Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.
Many Coloradans are shocked to find “another Columbine” at their doorstep.
I am not among them.
Nothing about our culture – and the elements that seem to create gun-weilding monsters – seems to have changed since Columbine.
If anything, they’ve gotten more intense with the disintegration of our economy.
You see the statements people put out. Everyone is “shocked and saddened.” I am only saddened.
Click here to read my column on Marketwatch.com.
Barack Obama takes a lot of shots against contender Mitt Romney for shutting down factories and killing jobs.
I am all for this. I hate when powerful and privileged people make gobs of money wiping out jobs.
But I wonder if President Obama has ever had the same conversation with his wife.
In 2007, I wrote a column regarding Michelle Obama’s seat on the board of Westchester, Ill.-based TreeHouse Foods Inc. I think it got lost amid all the bluster about hype about hope and change.
TreeHouse shut down a pickle plant, wiping out 153 jobs in the rural town of LaJunta, Colo.
TreeHouse was likely under pressure to cut costs because one of it’s largest customers was – you guessed it – Wal-Mart. A spokeswoman for Obama’s campaign told me Ms. Obama wasn’t the decision maker on this deal and that this should not “this be seen as them benefiting from investing in corporate America.” But I had no idea how she could say that with a straight face.
Wiping out the middle class and the working people is a bi-partisan effort.
Click here to read my 2007 column in The Denver Post. The Obamas are playing the same corporate games they pretend to abhor. And now, after four years in the White Hosue, the proof is really in the pickle.
Bernerd Young was a top guy at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and then he went to work as the chief compliance officer for the largest Ponzi scheme in history behind Bernie Madoff.
His former boss, R. Allen Stanford is in prison, but so far, Young has not been charged with anything. And yet now he’s complaining about it. He told Reuters he was being denied due process as this unresolved case hangs over his head. Click here to read the Reuters story. And click here to read the column I wrote on Mr. Young in 2009. And click here to watch me talk about it on Fox Business.
This is the story of a regulator going to work for the very people he was supposed to regulate. He put his seal of approval on a blatant, global fraud totaling more than $7 billion. And yet so far, the regulators have said nothing about it.
Mr. Young is right when he says due process is being denied.
How many corporate jets does a dwindling computer company need?
Hewlett-Packard maintains a fleet of seven Gulfstream Vs, among the most expensive jets in corporate America.
Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.
A recent Time magazine cover asks, “Why can’t the Army win the war on suicide?”
It is a difficult thing to come home from war, and society does not do enough to help returning veterans.
The New York Stock Exchange is trying to set a better example with a new program designed to help veterans start careers on Wall Street. Lucas Mohr, I am sure will be one of their first success stories.
Click here to read my column about Mohr on MarketWatch.
Meantime, back in Gotham City, menacing Batman movie billboards tower over the sidewalks around Times Square.
Darkness has indeed risen. News media interview moviegoers. Police up security around theaters in fear of copycats.
I got a phone call early this morning to go out to Aurora, Colo., and report on the theater shooting, but I am here in New York, unable to jump on a tragic story about 18 miles from my home.
I can only marvel at the chaos advertised in this film. Any wonder the victims could not discern between the violence on the big screen and the real violence coming at them?
Seems to me this a repeating story that can be reduced to three words: Nut With Guns.
Cries rise for gun control, a curb on the glorified violence we see in the movies and on TV, more help for the mentally ill … We have had all these discussions before. They have gone no where.
All we know for sure is that in the real world there are indeed monstrous villains, but there are no super heroes.
