JPMorgan, Lehman, UBS Named in Bid-Rigging Conspiracy
JPMorgan Chase & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and UBS AG were among more than a dozen Wall Street firms involved in a conspiracy to pay below-market Interest Rates to U.S. state and local governments on investments, according to documents filed in a U.S. Justice Department criminal antitrust case. A government list of previously unidentified "co- conspirators" contains more than two dozen Bankers at firms also including Bank of America Corp., Bear Stearns Cos., Societe Generale, two...

Robert Reich: The Fed in Hot Water
The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns -- taking on tens of billions of Dollars of the bank's bad loans -- in order to smooth Bear Stearns' takeover by JP Morgan Chase. The secret Fed Bailout came months before Congress authorized the Government to spend up to $700 billion of Taxpayer Dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of Dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official...

Turns out, they are the Mob
What Robert Reich says: The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns " taking on tens of billions of Dollars of the bank's bad loans " in order to smooth Bear Stearns' takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed Bailout came months before Congress authorized the Government to spend up to $700 billion of Taxpayer Dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of Dollars worth of AIG securities, also...

(The Fed in Hot Water)
Thursday, April 1, 2010 The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns " taking on tens of billions of Dollars of the bank's bad loans " in order to smooth Bear Stearns' takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed Bailout came months before Congress authorized the Government to spend up to $700 billion of Taxpayer Dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of Dollars worth of AIG securities, also...

Rich Stunned by Recession Sell Munis for First Time: Joe Mysak
For the first time in decades, the rich showed no confidence in state and local governments during a Recession. The wave of selling began in the summer of 2007, when Hedge Funds and some mutual Funds were forced to raise cash to meet redemptions. Municipal bonds retained the most value, and the rich didn't hesitate to sell. Such selling accelerated in 2008, as the subprime meltdown claimed securities firms Bear Stearns Cos., sold at a fire sale, and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which was...

The Fed in Hot Water
The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns - taking on tens of billions of Dollars of the bank's bad loans - in order to smooth Bear Stearns' takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed Bailout came months before Congress authorized the Government to spend up to $700 billion of Taxpayer Dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of Dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official...

US Federal Reserve bails out Bear Stearns
The Federal Reserve, the US Central Bank, is leading a desperate struggle to prop up one of Wall Street's largest and most historic Investment Banks, as the credit crisis threatened to spiral into a full-blown Banking crisis. In a day of developments that rocked the world's financial markets, the Fed said it and rival Wall Street Bank JPMorgan Chase had begun funnelling emergency loans to Bear Stearns, whose exposure to the battered credit markets had led to a crisis of confidence in its...

We should be policing Wall Street
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday it had begun an inquiry into two dozen Financial companies to determine whether they followed Accounting practices similar to those recently disclosed in an investigation of Lehman Brothers. Where on earth has the SEC been? It’s now clear Lehman Brothers’ balance sheet was bogus before the bank collapsed in 2008, catapulting the Street and the world into the worse Financial Crisis since 1929. The Lehman Bankruptcy...

one prawn at a time
The lastest edition of Vanity Fair has some great pieces. There’s the sequel to Wall Street – here’s the trailer for the new movie. And just for old time’s sake here’s two classics – the trailer of the 1987 original – and that speech by Gordon Gekko (and don’t pretend you don’t love it). And there’s also this fascinating piece about the wives of Lehman Brothers – it’s on the lifestyles of the sort of people who get...

Google Co-founder Sergey Brin Says China Reminds Him of His Native Soviet Union
Google's decision to stop service in China was based on the company's growing unease about the compromises required by Beijing, co-founder Sergey Brin tells the Wall Street Journal . The Censorship exercised by the government reminded him of life in the Soviet Union, which Brin and his parents left when he was 6. "I see the same Earmarks of Totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling," he says. Things got worse after the Olympics, and the cyber-attacks in January,...

Karl Rove's Advice For The Tea Partiers
Stay independent. Weed out the kooks. Get a focused message. From today's Wall Street Journal : My advice to them is to keep their distance from any single Party and instead influence both parties on Debt, spending and an over-reaching Federal Government. Allowing third-party movements to co-opt the Tea partiers' good name, which is happening in Nevada, will only serve to elect opponents of the Tea Party philosophy of low-taxes and fiscal restraint. It could also discredit the Tea Party...

Jerry Taylor
Jerry Taylor is among the most widely cited and influential critics of federal Energy and environmental Policy in the nation. Taylor is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and National Review and appears regularly on CNBC, NPR, Bloomberg Radio, the BBC, and Fox News. His op-eds on public Policy have appeared in the pages of The Washington Post , The New York Times , The Los Angeles Times and most other major dailies. His extended essays on Energy Policy have appeared in ...

Amazon Loses E-Book Pricing War
Brennon Slattery Publishers have emerged victorious in the e-book pricing war with Amazon. The world's largest online retailer has conceded to the demands of three major publishing houses and will cease heavily discounting new best-selling e-books, according to the Wall Street Journal . Amazon and Macmillan already exchanged fisticuffs about money in February with Macmillan leaving the ring unscathed . Now Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins have joined the bandwagon in refusing to...

Potato, Potato: NYT Says Hedge Fund Pay 'Roars Back,' WSJ Says CEO Pay 'Falls Again'
The covers of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times ' business section today both have huge stories on Wall Street pay. And they look very different. The Times story, "Pay of Hedge Fund Managers Roared Back Last Year," says that the country's top 25 Hedge Fund managers made $25.3 billion last year, easily beating the old 2007 high. It even shows the top ten: David Tepper, George Soros, James Simons, John Paulson, Steve Cohen (the only tie-less investor of the group), Carl Icahn...

WSJ cuts prices in battle with New York Times
* Murdoch challenges Times with a New York metro edition Stocks   |   Bonds   |   Global Markets   |   Media * Price cuts seen as risky move By Daniel Trotta New YORK, March 31 (Reuters) - The Wall Street Journal is cutting New subscription prices by as much as 80 percent in some cases as it prepares to confront its rival, the New York Times, with a New York City edition. The move comes amid a plunge in U.S. newspaper...

John Kerry Meets Syria's Assad
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High Marks For iPad From Reviewers
-- The Wall Street Journal 's Walter Mossberg says "this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the Laptop." -- Ed Baig at USA TODAY calls it "a winner" and says it "stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon's Kindle. It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money. At the very least, the iPad will likely drum up mass-market interest in tablet...

Obama Energy Pick Backs Higher Gas Tax
ABC News' Teddy Davis Reports: Barack Obama's pick for Department of Energy secretary backs higher gasoline taxes, a position which puts him at odds with the president-elect. "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe," Steven Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told the Wall Street Journal in September . Chu said he favors gradually ramping up gasoline taxes over 15 years to nudge consumers into buying...

About That Playboy in My Drawer . . .
I don't keep a copy of Playboy in my office drawer, but Bret Stephens does: It's time to make a personal and professional admission: I keep a copy of the Feb. 2007 issue of Playboy in a desk drawer in my Wall Street Journal office. This is not the sort of thing I ever thought I'd publicly confess. But I'm prompted to do so now in response to a string of online rebuttals to my Tuesday column, "Lady GaGa Versus Mideast Peace," in which I argue that Western Liberalism (in its old-fashioned sense)...

Perks Are Trimmed Amid Backlash on Pay
By DANA MATTIOLI Some CEO perks are disappearing in the aftermath of Recession and amid public outrage over Executive pay. CEO-Compensation Survey See the full results of the Wall Street Journal's 2009 pay survey. A Proxy-Statement Primer See a guide using excerpts of proxy statements from three companies. Forty-four of the 200 companies in The Wall Street Journal's 2009 chief-executive pay survey have eliminated at least one perk, compared with 27 concerns that eliminated perks the year...

Bret Stephens: About That Playboy in My Drawer
It's time to make a personal and professional admission: I keep a copy of the Feb. 2007 issue of Playboy in a desk drawer in my Wall Street Journal office. This is not the sort of thing I ever thought I'd publicly confess. But I'm prompted to do so now in response to a string of online rebuttals to my Tuesday column, " Lady GaGa Versus Mideast Peace ," in which I argue that Western Liberalism (in its old-fashioned sense) has done far more than Israel's Settlements to provoke violent Muslim...

WSJ's Farnam heads to WaPo
Wall Street Journal reporter Timothy Farnam will soon be taking his database expertise over to The Washington Post, according to a source. Farnam, who’s been at the Journal for the past couple of years, has been regarded internally as an integral part of the paper’s Lobbying and Campaign Finance coverage. When reached by phone, Farnam declined to comment on the report.

Top News: Jihad Jane we know, so who is Jihad Jamie?
Top News: Jihad Jane we know, so who is Jihad Jamie, this second Jihad Jane? Travelers keeping up with the news have heard of Jihad Jane and know she traveled to Ireland where she is now being held by Irish police. But they want to know, who is Jihad Jamie ? The Wall Street Journal has reported that a mom from Colorado also traveled to Ireland and is also being detained there by the Irish police. They are holding her in connection with the alleged plot to Murder  cartoonist, Lars...

Richard Pérez-Peña
By RICHARD PéREZ-PEñA The Wall Street Journal intends to start its new local news section for the New York area on April 26, not April 12, as had previously been reported. March 24, 2010, 3:24 pm