Section » Law
Sunshine Is The Best Disinfectant
Devra Davis nearly died from taking a popular painkiller. She later discovered that previous lawsuits exposed that the manufacturer knew the drug could be lethal, but used judicially approved secret settlements to conceal the information from the public. Alarming? It should be. The story is not unique. There are heaps of reported instances in
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The Health Care Conundrum
“I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes, not incremental changes, not small changes.” Thus announced Senator Barack Obama in January 2008. Now, a year and half later, president Barack Obama is trying to deliver on his promise
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Getting Education Right, Right Now
Before he voluntarily resigned from the presidency, George Washington described for Thomas Jefferson his vision of a national university. He wanted a faculty consisting of luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, and to offer students the chance to sit in on congressional debates, “thereby becoming
The SEC Fiddled While Rome Burned (Part 2 of 3)
Part 2 of 3. In 1992, the Securities & Exchange Commission was presented with a trail straight into Bernie Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme. But the SEC ignored it. Then, in 2000, in a memo urging the SEC promptly to investigate Madoff, an independent forensic accountant outlined his
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The SEC Fiddled While Rome Burned (Part 1 of 3)
Part 1 of 3. In 2004, the Securities & Exchange Commission made a decision that doomed our economy to failure. In a meeting lasting less than an hour on April 28, 2004, the agency approved of a rule that let the country’s five largest investment banks–including Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers,
The Economic Stimulus: Can Obama Do What He Set Out To Do?
In his first few weeks in office, President Obama attempted to set a tone of compromise in Washington, conceding a few issues to GOP House members on the stimulus and otherwise making a good faith effort to engage in an open and honest debate with everyone in Congress. It was an honest approach that
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The Psychology of Financial Bubbles
Why is it that economic bubbles are created, over and over again? What’s the psychological component? Virginia Postrel writes about the psychology of financial bubbles in a recent Atlantic Magazine, and makes some fascinating
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Top Five Causes of the Financial Crisis
1. Alternative Realities: The Black-Scholes Revolution Hatched by two MIT finance wizards, the Black-Scholes model of pricing options securities took hold in the financial industry in the 1980s. It was known as “Portfolio Insurance” because it purported to free traders of all market
Employee Free Choice Act Issues
The SF Chronicle last week published a piece on the Employee Free Choice Act in response to my own Nov. 19 piece.
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Throwing Stones At Glass-Steagall
There is so much that all of us can do to make sure another financial crisis of the magnitude we are currrently experiencing (and will continue to experience), does not happen again. The culture of excess, greed, the tyranny of self-interest, and social irresponsibility, are some of the core causes
