This week, the House passed a bill that imposes further regulations on financial firms - on executive pay which is bad enough in itself, and to add insult to injury, on the way those firms and employees do business. The bill is "aimed at preventing...

Crack open any financial textbook and you’ll find the objective of every finance department is to “maximize shareholder wealth.” That is their objective, concern, and responsibility. When individual investors buy into a company, they...

Both Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and Leonardo DiCaprio's film "The 11th Hour" do a great job of manipulating (and in some cases outright distorting) the facts about climate change to scare people. They scare people into...

This week, the wacky government of Venezuela banned Coke Zero from being sold in the country. Citing harmful ingredients , it claimed to be protecting the health of its citizens, while the government purports to conduct an investigation into potentially...

Remember when the Obama Administration said while pushing for the stimulus bill to be passed that it would be timely and targeted? The Heritage Foundation has been tracking the claims and has found that the bill is neither. As this chart provided by Heritage...

Yesterday, President Obama urged Congress to pass credit-card reform legislation by Memorial Day. In his weekly address, he stated , "There is no time for delay...We need a durable and successful flow of credit in our economy, but we can't tolerate...

I came across this post at naked capitalism a couple of days ago and thought it very interesting. It appears that the Obama administration is guilty of gaming the financial securities rating system to make its über-solution for the financial crisis ( nicknamed TALF ) more attractive to private investors. A little bit of background is required here, though. Ratings companies like Moody's, Standard and Poors, and Fitch Ratings traditionally have the task of examining various financial instruments (such as mortgage-based securities, credit card securities, and bonds) and rating them on the soundness of the collateral that undergirds the security . The most sound vehicles get the coveted AAA rating . These agencies, and Moody's especially, have been criticized for rating "toxic paper" too highly and for waiting too long to downgrade failing companies like AIG when the collateral for their various securities started to evaporate. Now, though, the administration needs these companies to rate the...