Thursday, February 12, 2009

Bailout money and public deficit

First, the piece of news we talked about in class. The breakdown of the bailout here.
On a related topic: what's our public deficit? A rough estimate: For each one of us = $37,703.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

More news about Bernard "the magician" Madoff

Fresh from the NYTimes: The witness, whistleblower Harry Markopolos, will testify that Mr. Madoff “was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and in a position to easily end our careers or worse,” and that his fund “posed great danger” to those who investigated it, based on a version of his remarks that emerged Tuesday evening. (...) He (Markopolos) and his colleagues avoided taking their allegations to the industry self-regulatory agency, now called Finra, he said in the statement, because he believed Mr. Madoff and his brother, Peter B. Madoff, wielded too much power with that organization. Peter Madoff worked in his brother’s firm but has not been implicated in the apparent fraud. “We were concerned that we would have tipped off the target too directly and exposed ourselves to great harm,” he wrote. They did not turn to the F.B.I., he said, “because we believed the F.B.I. would have rejected us” without the endorsement of the S.E.C. staff. He did not address why he did not approach members of Congress, attorneys general in New York or Boston, or state or federal prosecutors