The Great Afghan Bank Heist
“Poring over stacks of documents, investigators at the American Embassy in Kabul have pinpointed dozens of instances in which Kabul Bank executives may have bribed Afghan officials, including a successful bid to hold the contract to process the salaries that the government pays its employees each month—approximately seventy-five million dollars. Access to the salaries would give bank officials an opportunity to earn millions of dollars in interest in the course of a single year.
‘The stock market is for suckers’
“No wonder American companies like Facebook are avoiding the hoi polloi of traditional stock markets in favour of raising capital from private, rich investors. “The idea of the stock market was to help businesses raise capital, and to provide people, individuals, with a chance to invest their savings and participate in that growth and have enough money to retire,” says Peter Cohan, president of Peter S. Cohan and Associates, a venture capital and management consulting firm in Marlborough, Mass. “But in the last decade the whole thing seems to have fallen apart.” Where the market once helped investors and companies, now it’s failing both.
The Rise of the New Global Elite
“F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.
Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street
“Over the past decade, algorithmic trading has overtaken the industry. From the single desk of a startup hedge fund to the gilded halls of Goldman Sachs, computer code is now responsible for most of the activity on Wall Street. (By some estimates, computer-aided high-frequency trading now accounts for about 70 percent of total trade volume.) Increasingly, the market’s ups and downs are determined not by traders competing to see who has the best information or sharpest business mind but by algorithms feverishly scanning for faint signals of potential profit.
(via Long Reads)
Pass the bucks
“Steve Boggan followed a $10 note around the US. The people who pocketed it – from the couple clearing repossessed houses to the merchant banker – tell the story of the country’s faltering economic recovery
What Good is Wall Street?
“Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain’s top financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, has described much of what happens on Wall Street and in other financial centers as “socially useless activity”—a comment that suggests it could be eliminated without doing any damage to the economy. In a recent article titled “What Do Banks Do?,” which appeared in a collection of essays devoted to the future of finance, Turner pointed out that although certain financial activities were genuinely valuable, others generated revenues and profits without delivering anything of real worth—payments that economists refer to as rents. “It is possible for financial activity to extract rents from the real economy rather than to deliver economic value,” Turner wrote. “Financial innovation … may in some ways and under some circumstances foster economic value creation, but that needs to be illustrated at the level of specific effects: it cannot be asserted a priori.”
Threadbare
“Fears about Ireland’s public finances and banks have made a European bail-out look imminent. How deep is the country’s economic mire?
Farewell to Wall Street
“[Andrew Clark] recalls the extraordinary events that nearly bankrupted America – and how it’s bouncing back.
The Japan Syndrome
“China’s teetering on the verge of its own lost decade, and a meltdown in Beijing would make Japan’s economic malaise look like child’s play.
Economists Who Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)
“Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen.
