The Wall Street Examiner Sun 2010-05-09 10:02 EDT

The Minsky Cruise (part 3, Business)

...While non-financial domestic corporate profits have shrunk from a Korean War inspired 11% of GDP to average around 5% of GDP since 1970, the financial sector's profits have been growing...The love affair with finance and disdain for what, during the tech boom, we called the "bricks and mortar" industry- and admittedly a failure, by some in those industries, to accept the transition to maturity- has inspired, for want of a better word, envy in the non-financial sector. While financial sector stocks seem to levitate on their own, non-financial sector stocks, if intent can be inferred from behavior, are believed to require a boost. I suspect the use of options as payment has something to do with this as well...Additionally, the non-financial sector, since the mid-80s has- a true sign of envy- opted to copy finance, by breaking into that field. GE Capital and GMAC Financial are two prominent examples...To paraphrase Nixon, "we're all Ponzis, now."

business; Minsky Cruise; Part 3; Wall Street Examiner.

Fri 2009-10-23 08:55 EDT

Is Goldman Sachs Evil? Or Just Too Good? -- New York Magazine (2009-07-26)

Joe Hagan

(Goldman Sachs, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, John Rogers, John Whitehead, AIG, Neil Barofsky, Troubled Asset Relief Program, Morgan Stanley, Hank Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein, John Thain, Lehman Brothers, Standard & Poor's, Tim Geithner, JPMorgan Chase, Jon Winkelried, David Solomon, Richard Friedman, Jamie Dimon, Robert Rubin, Dan Jester, Eric Dinallo, Hank Greenberg, Edward C. Forst, Neel Kashkari, Edward Liddy, Stephen Friedman, Sidney Weinberg, TARP, Joseph --Stiglitz, Lucas van Praag, Frank Suozzo, Mike Morgan, Matt Taibbi, Edith Cooper, Byron Trott, Warren Buffett, Barney Frank, John Thornton, Michael Lewis, Larry Summers, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Hormats, Eliot Spitzer) Inside Goldman Sachs, America's most successful, cynical, envied, despised, and (in its view, anyway) misunderstood engine of capitalism. [2009-07-26]

2009-07-26; Goldman Sachs evil; good; just; New York magazine.

naked capitalism Sun 2009-09-20 10:17 EDT

Guest Post: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard & the City's hard EU choices

Swedish Lex

The City's political clout in Brussels is waning as the UK's financial industry model has gone from being the envy of the European peers to being a liability. Meanwhile, the EU will in the future probably be proposing new banking and financial services legislation that may be superficially marketed by decision-makers as striving to provide a clear cut with the existing Anglo-Saxon casino model. This guest post will discuss some of the fundamental choices that the City is facing, the most significant being whether or not to be advocating a UK withdrawal from the EU altogether.

Ambrose Evans Pritchard; City's hard EU choices; Guest Post; naked capitalism.