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We Are All “Yappers Who Don’t Know Anything”
By James Kwak According to ex-Lehman executives interviewed by Max Abelson (hat tip Felix Salmon). To summarize, they say that using borderline-legal transactions to massage your balance sheet at the...
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How Times Change
By James Kwak For those waiting, the paperback edition of 13 Bankers went on sale on Tuesday to little fanfare. That’s not surprising; all of the crisis books have been dribbling out in paperback,...
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What Did the SEC Really Do in 2004?
By James Kwak Andrew Lo’s review of twenty-one financial crisis books has been getting a fair amount of attention, including a recent mention in The Economist. Simply reading twenty-one books about the...
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How The Banks Stole Medicare
By Simon Johnson The world’s largest banks have been accused of many things in recent years, including taking excessive risk in the run-up to 2008, doing great damage to the American economy by blowing...
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Non-Lessons of the Financial Crisis
By James Kwak As the fifth anniversary of the Lehman bankruptcy approaches, the Internet is filling up with reflections on the financial crisis and the ensuing years. My main feeling, as expressed in...
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Five Years Later
By James Kwak Five years ago, Lehman brothers went bankrupt, AIG was nationalized, Ben Bernanke stared into an abyss, and Mohamed El-Erian asked his wife to take out as much cash from the ATM as she...
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The Wall Street Takeover, Part 2
By James Kwak Five years later, and things seem marginally better in some areas (the CFPB exists), significantly worse in others (LIBOR, money laundering, London Whale, etc.). There has been some...
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The Prosecution That Isn’t Happening
By James Kwak People keep asking why no senior executive has gone to jail for the misdeeds that produced the financial crisis—and cost the United States more than $6 trillion, or $50,000 per household,...
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The Free Market’s Weak Hand
By James Kwak “Except where market discipline is undermined by moral hazard, owing, for example, to federal guarantees of private debt, private regulation generally is far better at constraining...
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The “Chicken(expletive) Club”
By James Kwak Update: See notes in bold below. The only “Wall Street” “executive” to go to jail for the financial crisis was Kareem Serageldin, the head of a trading desk at Credit Suisse, according to...
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Larry Summers Should Keep His Mouth Shut
By James Kwak Larry Summers is well on his way to rehabilitating his public image as a brilliant intellectual, moving on from his checkered record as president of Harvard University and as President...
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The Value of Connections in 2008
By James Kwak These days, some papers get more attention when they are in draft form than when they are published, in part because of the length of the review and publication cycle. Recall the Romer...
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And the Award for Best Financial Crisis Book …
… goes to Chain of Title, by David Dayen (with apologies to Jennifer Taub, Alyssa Katz, Michael Lewis, and many others, including my co-author, Simon Johnson). Chain of Title isn’t primarily about the...
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COVID-19: Who Bears the Losses?
By James Kwak Our business and household sectors are losing lots of money every day, and will continue to lose money for the foreseeable future. People no longer spend money at restaurants. Restaurant...
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