Bailout

Sleazy for-profit educator of the day, Bridgepoint edition

Posted on March 09, 2011
Chris Kirkham has a fantastic story at HuffPo today about Ashford University, a small college in Iowa which was acquired for its accreditation in 2005 and is now the face of the billion-dollar for-profit education company Bridgepoint Education.

McKinsey?s corrupted culture

Posted on March 09, 2011
John Gapper makes a good point: management consultants in general, and McKinsey consultants in particular, have made their entire business out of exploiting the moral grey zone surrounding confidential information.

BofA doesn?t believe in treating borrowers fairly

Posted on March 09, 2011
Bank of America is setting up a bad bank, which will be run by Terry Laughlin.

How to funnel money to bankers and brokers, housing edition

Posted on March 09, 2011
Linda Stern has replied to my post about her dreadful advice to leverage up as much as you can to buy a house right now. And she's not backing down:

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Slugging in DC

Posted on March 09, 2011
Emily Badger's article on slugging in DC is a really fantastic piece of reporting

Counterparties

Posted on March 08, 2011
Since when does the WSJ consider a 4-digit sum a "Big Payday"? When it's "for Some Hill Staffers" of course -- WSJ

The well-intentioned but doomed mortgage settlement

Posted on March 08, 2011
No wonder the proposed settlement with mortgage servicers is proving to hard to write about: it's really hard to read. There might be a lot of Elizabeth Warren in its substance, but there's none of her in its style.

Housing: The leverage bulls return

Posted on March 08, 2011
I know that memories are short on Wall Street. But are they short on Main Street too? Reading Linda Stern's latest paean to leverage and housing risk, it certainly seems that way.

Reporting the debit interchange debate

Posted on March 08, 2011
Edward Wyatt has a big piece in the NYT on the banks' last-ditch attempts to weaken the rules reducing debit-card fees -- attempts which might be working, especially given Barney Frank's long-standing opposition to the rule.

Why isn?t Rajat Gupta facing criminal charges?

Posted on March 08, 2011
Andrew Ross Sorkin examines the weirdnesses surrounding the Rajat Gupta case today, and comes to the conclusion that the government "appears" not to have recorded any of Gupta's phone calls after all.

Counterparties

Posted on March 07, 2011
Roger Lowenstein on the cost of avoiding muni default -- NYT

Incompetent mortgage servicers read the writing on the wall

Posted on March 07, 2011
How incompetent are mortgage servicers?

The attorney generals? proposed bank settlement

Posted on March 07, 2011
Cheyenne Hopkins, of American Banker, has a great coup today: she's found the famous 27-page term sheet laying out exactly how the state attorneys general are trying to force mortgage servicers to "change a dysfunctional system", in the words of Iowa AG Tom Miller.

Why did the NYT nuke Ten Ones?

Posted on March 07, 2011
What exactly happened at the Ten Ones blog? I asked NYT spokesperson Kristin Mason, and she replied with this:

The economics of Business Insider

Posted on March 07, 2011
Henry Blodget has a great post about the Business Insider business model, in which he reveals that his mini-empire basically broke even in 2010 on $4.8 million in revenue.

The Gupta-Rajaratnam tapes

Posted on March 07, 2011
I missed this on Friday:

The FT?s decline

Posted on March 06, 2011
I had a hard-to-follow Twitter debate yesterday about the FT's paywall, where a couple of FT types -- Alan Beattie and John Gapper -- told me that the latest numbers for digital subscribers show that I was wrong when I criticized the FT's strategy in October 2007.

The disappointing jobs situation

Posted on March 04, 2011
The general reaction to this morning's jobs report is "meh", as you might expect, given the release, where the phrases "changed little", "about unchanged", "little or no change", "unchanged", and "essentially unchanged" all appear in the first five paragraphs.

Chart of the day, US earnings edition

Posted on March 04, 2011
There's a lot going on here, but a large part of it is that between 1970 and today, the share of men without any earnings at all increased from 6 percent to 18 percent. ... But it's also going to have to look after the growing ranks of the unemployed -- those who are looking for work, to be sure, and also the growing ranks of those who don't even bother any more.

Frank Rich vs the NYT paywall

Posted on March 04, 2011
Megan Garber has a great column at Nieman Lab on the effect of paywalls on journalists:

Nick Denton?s paradoxes

Posted on March 03, 2011
I enjoyed my chat with Nick Denton at PaidContent 2011 today.

Counterparties

Posted on March 02, 2011
Neil Barofsky, TARP's outspoken overseer, will resign -- WaPo

Roubini?s big muni report

Posted on March 02, 2011
The RGE report on muni bonds is very good, and I'm sad I'm not allowed to share it with you. (On the other hand, according to former CEO Camille LeBlanc, "pick a bank, pick a hedge fund?they're probably a client?. So if you know anybody on Wall Street, they might well have a copy lying around somewhere...

Tail risk in microfinance, Muhammad Yunus edition

Posted on March 02, 2011
On Monday, it looked like Muhammad Yunus was going to survive as head of Grameen; today, it looks as though he's out.

When bonds lose their bid

Posted on March 02, 2011
A couple of big names are out with cautious bond market views this week. For the big picture, turn to Bill Gross, who's worried about what's going to asset prices -- both bonds and stocks -- when QE2 comes to its scheduled end on June 30. He has two main points:

Counterparties

Posted on March 02, 2011
Is McKinsey & Co. the Root of All Evil? -- Ritholtz

Counterparties

Posted on March 01, 2011
The Origins and Severity of the Public Pension Crisis, by Dean Baker -- CEPR

Be careful who you show off to, Rajat Gupta edition

Posted on March 01, 2011
John Carney asks why Rajat Gupta might have done what he's accused of doing:

When Goldman?s board meetings leaked

Posted on March 01, 2011
Back in April of last year, I was indignantly informed by Rajat Gupta's PR people that he wasn't being investigated by the SEC, just examined. "This is an important distinction," they told me. Well, it seems that either the examination subsequently turned into an investigation, or else that the distinction wasn't that important after all:

Why states shouldn?t adopt defined-contribution pensions

Posted on March 01, 2011
Steven Greenhouse has a long article in today's NYT about an attempt by the states to deal with their "strained" pension funds by moving to defined-contribution pension plans. Here's the lede:

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