You can’t blame Ken Lewis, the beleaguered CEO of Bank of America, for wanting to quit early.
It’s tough enough trying to manage a universal mega bank, without getting sniped at by the feds and the newly installed board of directors.
The proximate cause of his departure is the hasty decision to acquire Merrill Lynch.
This happened back […]
One of the most trusted and long lived market prognosticators is the Kiplinger Letter, available by subscription only.
I like the format. Four tightly edited pages, with pertinent charts and bullet points…it’s targeted to busy decision makers who want useful summary data, and not a lot of prose and theory.
The August 2009 letter was a sober […]
Starting October 23, the market looks as if it is entering the long postponed correction that has been missing in action since the heroic gains that started after we reached the March 12 year lows.
Everyone is entitled to their own theories. Here are a handful for your consideration.
1. The market always moves in a saw […]
It’s not just the mom and pop buyers who are looking at onerous mortgage resets on the poorly underwritten loans giddily funded back during the recent bubble.
The smart money in commercial real estate is not the Wall Street Firms that bought in at top dollar in 2007.
The smart money is the guys who sold to […]
It might, or might not comfort you to learn that brokers handled their own money as poorly as they did their clients in the recent debacle.
As reported in the Wall Street Journal article - “After 27% Fall, FINRA Plays it Safe” (9/25/09, page C1), The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority saw its $1.6 billion hoard tank […]
One of my favorite commentators is Rich Karlgaard, Publisher of Forbes. You can follow him in print every bi-weekly issue, as well as catch him doing the talking head circuit on the cable news shows.
By being based in Silicon Valley, he maintains his pulse on the new economy…while keeping his jaundiced eye on the decaying, […]
Individual investors are once again proving to be remarkably consistent and predictable in their collective response to the historic bear market of 2008-2009.
By which, I refer to their unerring instinct to buy at the top…and sell at the bottom.
It was just a year ago that the world was coming to an end. Stocks were in […]
That’s what they call it when the casino’s comp their “whales” (high rollers) with free chips. Because they know that once they burn through the free money, they will dig into their own pockets to enable their addiction.
It’s as old as the angler’s practice of chumming the waters to start the fish on a feeding […]
