# Elizabeth Warren-a-thon. I first tripped over the Harvard Law Professor on the Daily Show back in April:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Elizabeth Warren Pt. 1 | ||||
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2 | ||||
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The Huff Post has more from the TARP fund watchdog with out-takes from Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. Matt Taibbi sez Elizabeth Warren for President.
# On the subject of Matt Taibbi, his latest sketch of the blood funnelers in Rolling Stone almost creates sympathy for former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld. Along with Bear Stearns, Lehman was a target of vast naked short selling prior to their crash. Here's a sobering morsel. HT Bernard Hickey:
The best way to grasp what happened is to look at the data: On Tuesday, March 11th, there were 201,768 shares of Bear that had failed to deliver. The very next day, the number of phantom shares leaped to 1.2 million. By the close of trading that Friday, the number passed 2 million — and when the market reopened the following Monday, it soared to 13.7 million. In less than a week, the number of counterfeit shares in Bear had jumped nearly seventyfold.WTF is naked short selling anyway? Here's Matt Taibbi and a whiteboard.
# Mother Jones ponders whether then-Treasury secretary Hank Paulson broke the law with a Moscow meeting in June 2008 with the Goldman Sachs Board of Directors:
When Paulson and the firm's execs got together at the Moscow Marriott Grand Hotel, the Treasury secretary gave the Goldman Sachs crew his read on what was happening with the economy and his department's effort to prepare for handling failed banks. He also previewed for them an important speech he would soon deliver.# After all this evidence of corrupt insider trading, Fran O'Sullivan's column on NZ's Securites Commission almost seems a bit of an anti-climax. Almost. Just because the US SEC is a piece of shit, it doesn't mean our own companies watchdog has to be a bit shit too:
The commission subjected 20 companies to its latest surveillance exercise. It found a widespread lack of transparency. The commission noted it was "particularly concerned" over the lack of transparency around the under-lying assumptions used to value assets, disclosures over third-party transactions and the composition of unexplained expenses.# NatRad News is reporting that KiwiSaver is worth less than the sum of its deposits:
Six companies have received "please explain" letters over their related party transactions. But if past practice is anything to go by Diplock will be easily satisfied with a promise by the companies concerned to clarify or make the necessary disclosures in their next set of financial statements.
The scheme is managing $3.039bn of assets, which is $115m less than the total of $3.154bn invested by the public and the Crown in the two years.# Bill Moyers Journal looks at the life of Justice Justice, the judge who brought Texas kicking and screaming into the 20th century.
# UK Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge wonders what will face juries in the 21st century, when people can't sit still and listen and think for any length of time.
# Dutch law supposedly protects client-lawyer phone calls from surveillance, which is why they are frantic about the inability to delete tapped calls from other data. How the hell NZ's new Search & Surveillance works around this here, Dagg only knows.
# And finally, because you managed to stick in there through all those economics links, here's some real good bullet time photography. HT Daily Dish:
