Brett Arends on Why Your Mom & Pop Can’t Invest for Sh*t

Loved this rant from Brett at MarketWatch yesterday, he’s more right than he knows judging by the stuff I’ve seen… First, their minds have been playing tricks on them all along. The crash of 2008 did not wipe out half their savings, unless they invested all their money right at the peak and sold right…

Jim Chanos on the Cycle of Frauds

The below section comes from a larger, must-read Jim Chanos interview that just popped up at Salon.com, of all places. In it, the legendary skeptic and short-selling maven talks about why frauds tend to cluster around the back-half of expansions and booms… What do we know about the timing of frauds? When are they most…

Wall Street’s “Original Sin”

I’d like to share with you a key pair of sentences from the congressional report on MF Global’s collapse, summing up a long investigation led by Louis Freeh: Corzine, an active trader at the firm, was supposed to be supervised by the company’s chief compliance officer. But the oversight mechanism was put in place to…

Boy, Interrupted

There I am, minding my own business and taking my first weekend away from the work and the kids in god-know-how-long and before you know it, I’m doubled over in gastrointestinal agony. One moment I’m having dinner with my wife and our friends at a New Jersey mountaintop resort and the next thing I know…