Underbelly

Ritholtz posted a clever but instructive skewering of gold mania . He got some of the predictable blowback.  In response to the blowback, R...

Buncha crybabies: The dramatic boardroom coup at the bank’s Park Avenue headquarters has rankled some people at Citi, especially senior ...

Another post about bankers, this time the Swiss variety.  Years ago I heard that Swiss banking got its start when Protestant bankers, cross...

She said he'd write a book . Now this

Saturday New York Times , p B1, UR (dead tree): London Banking Is Losing Its Gentlemen's Club Ways Book title, Penguin 2000 (by ...

Had an interesting, if inconclusive, discussion this morning with my friend about Ignota about what we (know) (do not know) about the enduri...

This will be easy to misunderstand so bear with me while I try to explain--but I really don't get the whole Greg Smith thing .  I mean--...

Ha!  Wouldn't that be the best joke of a fairly unfunny financial crisis?  Dealbook points out that the Volcker rule, with its limit on...

From a diatribe against briefing paper on Dodd-Frank : . The muddle [of Dodd-Frank] stands in sharp contrast to the aftermath of earlie...

I'm still trying to digest Gabriel Sherman's New York Magazine piece on " The End of Wall Street as They Knew  It ," sugg...

Still can't make up my mind just what to think of  Jeffrey Madrick's Age of Greed .  There were times when I found myself thinking t...

Oh, looky folks, here's a paperback ($2.25) copy of The Bankers , by Martin Mayer, copyright 1974 (mine is a 1977 reprint, with a 1977 i...

In Lehman Brothers' Dance With Delusion , Stanley J. Dziedzic, Jr., did not write the book he thought he wrote--nor the book I thought I...

Reading William Cohan's new chronicle of Goldman Sachs makes me think of nothing so much as Louis D. Brandeis, late Supreme Court justi...

Count on Felix Salmon to aggregate, interpret and expand upon all the good stuff on the Madodff/Chase connection.   The best of it is the pa...

I'm getting acquainted with my corporate finance class this week. They seem to be a bunch of engaging young people, bright and inquisi...

  "Think Yiddish," they used to say, "dress British."  These days, you should dress Swiss.  We learn that USB, the Swiss...

    "Over the past few months," fawns reports Roger Lowenstein, "[J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie] Dimon allowed me into his inn...

Ignoto invites me to assemble a catalog of reasons why banking has degenerated from croquet to rollerball: Old-fashioned "character len...

I'll endorse the conventional wisdom that Goldman Sachs' Abacus deal does not pass the smell test, but it is a bit more tricky to is...