January 1, 2009 at 12:01 pm
This year is going to be a goodie. As you make your New Years resolutions, consider some of the steps we’ve outlined in our comprehensive guide to Coming Clean. You’ll find valuable suggestions in this article.
January 1, 2009 at 9:01 am
This government has lost the capacity to govern because a shadow government has taken over. The narco-mafia state is now completely consolidated.
– Ashraf Ghani, former Afghan finance minister on corruption in Afghanistan
See Bribes Corrode Afghans’ Trust in Government
NY Times (1 Jan 2009)
December 31, 2008 at 9:12 am
One of the things that makes a town wonderful is a great local newspaper. Hohenwald, Tennessee (of financial permaculture fame) has the Lewis County Herald, which is the finest local newspaper I have found. I became a subscriber this summer, so this is my first Christmas reading the Lewis County Herald.
I just got the Christmas edition in the mail: it dedicated seventeen pages to “Letters to Santa” written by children in the local area. Now that is a WOW on the Popsicle Index scale!
December 30, 2008 at 2:12 pm
The housing and derivatives bubble sure was good for retired Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and wife NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell. They just turned up in the University of Pennsylvania’s latest list of donors for $5 million or more.
View the Penn donor list
If you want to understand how the money works at your alma mater, just ask them for the last three years of tax returns and annual reports. You may be surprised at what you learn about who depends on bubble blowers.
Financial Fraud: The Tip-Off
“Tell me why I’m so lucky!” This was the challenge hurled by the head of Capital Markets of my former Wall Street firm at any trader who booked a profit. My partner, who ran our trading business, had the Head of Accounting sitting outside his office and he tracked the firm’s securities operations like a hawk. Since perfect markets have the profits squeezed out of them, a reported profit demanded an explanation. Why were we so lucky?
My former partner lived the first rule of avoiding financial scams: understand where your money is, what it is doing, and the logic of your profits. If you don’t understand, if it does not make sense to you, if it does not reflect how the real world really works, then it is prudent to assume you are dealing with fraud.
Continue reading ‘Financial Fraud: The Tip-Off’
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