04.30.10

The Goldman Sachs Defense

Posted in Blog at 11:48 am

The following exchange on the website LinkedIn was stimulated by a question posed by the sales manager for an Indian securities firm, “What are the three most essential skills of an equity sales person?”  The question was posted on April 28, 2010, at the time of the acrimonious Congressional hearings on Goldman, Sachs’ alleged misbehavior in marketing a CDO that was deliberately designed, at the request of a Goldman client, as a shorting vehicle, without telling purchasers of the security Read more [...]

04.21.10

Letter to the National Review re Need for Financial Regulation

Posted in Blog at 1:23 pm

It should be incumbent upon conservatives to push for the right kind of regulation, even if this gives Washington some new powers. The worst financial power the Government has right now is their ability to get in bed with a handful of giant banks in a corporatist muddle of interests, as one set of barons might deal with another. Only by modifying the system can we reduce the risk of that. Read more [...]

04.20.10

The Toyota Disaster and Japanese Governance

Posted in Blog at 5:31 pm

Corporate governance is a risk factor, not a profit factor. It doesn't do anyone much good to defend one's governance practices by pointing to the track record. The point is to protect your company against what might go wrong in the future, both foreseeable risks, such as management succession issues and yes, product recalls, and the ‘Black Swans’ you can’t even envision. Toyota wasn't doing that, couldn’t respond properly when such an issue arose, and a major marketing disaster was the result. Read more [...]

04.01.10

Glass-Steagall Re-revisited

Posted in Blog at 1:28 pm

Through most of the history of this saga of burdensome regulation and artificial barriers, the American banks remained some of the most highly-rated and most profitable in the world, with higher returns on assets and larger market capitalizations than most of their foreign counterparts. One question still troubles me: What were they all whining about, and why should we have broken our system in order to accommodate them? Read more [...]