Reading Time: < 1 minute The Financial Times has reported that America’s top banks need not raise the full amount of capital mandated by the recent “stress tests” if they manage to book higher than expected earnings: The banks have 28 days to announce their capital-raising plans and until November 9 to implement them. Wells Fargo and other banks that Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes Over at Electric Politics, former diplomat George Kenney offers a seldom-seen view of super-emissary Richard Holbrooke, once a top figure in the Clinton Administration and now President Obama’s special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan. Whether you agree or disagree, it is interesting to get something other than the almost uniformly laudatory media coverage. Kenney’s posting Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute David Sirota asks three questions that all journalists should be raising about President Obama’s alliance with the health care industry to reduce costs and reform the system: 1) If the health industry is saying it can lower costs by $2 trillion over 10 years and remain highly profitable, isn’t the industry admitting that it was Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sometimes, here at WhoWhatWhy, we find it useful to see what was said, back in the good old days, about the institutions that later became so reviled. Along these lines, we refer you to an April 2007 New York Magazine cover package, “Behind the Hedge”—a primer on hedge funds and the (almost all) men who Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes In an opinion piece, the Wall Street Journal convincingly argues that top Democrats in Congress have been speaking out of both sides of their mouths in criticizing Bush Administration policy on Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs), also known as torture. These days, Speaker Pelosi insists she heard and saw no evil. “We were not — I Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute In a revealing interview with the New York Times that stretched over five hours, the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, offered to be “part of the solution” in the quest for peace in the Middle East, and granted the surprising concession that his movement was only seeking a state in the areas Israel won in 1967. Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute The Scientist reports that Elsevier, the world’s leading publisher of scientific and medical texts, has taken money from Merck and other pharmaceutical companies to issue official-looking journals that subtly pushed their products. Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute The standard justification for the continued existence of the mysterious and unaccountable $55 billion-plus juggernaut called “the intelligence community” is that it gathers important information for decision-makers, and presents it to them in hush-hush circumstances. There’s an alternative to this proposition: people could try supporting the news media. In a May 5 New York Times Read More
Reading Time: 2 minutes In an article titled “Debate on Trump Project takes the Low Road,” about some troubling goings-on in the hamlet of Balmedie, Scotland, the lead paragraphs read as follows: Since refusing to let Donald Trump buy his house, inconveniently located in the middle of Mr. Trump’s planned $1.5 billion development in the countryside here, Michael Forbes Read More
Reading Time: < 1 minute The Wall Street Journal published a stunning report yesterday on how New York Federal Reserve Chairman Stephen Friedman enriched himself by purchasing Goldman Sachs stock while the Federal Reserve was propping up the investment bank: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York shaped Washington’s response to the financial crisis late last year, which buoyed Goldman Read More