The report of the court-appointed examiner in Lehman Brothers’ US bankruptcy proceedings, issued on March 11, was a bombshell for the accounting profession by revealing how the failing investment bank hid liabilities in the tens of billions with the use of accounting shenanigans. Despite alerts from whistleblowers, auditors from Ernst & [...]

Read full post

For nearly two years now we have waited for a speech. We need a simple speech and a direct speech—most of all a political speech—about what exactly happened to our financial system, and therefore to our economy, and what we must do to make sure it can never happen again.
President George W. [...]

Read full post

Lacking the policy instruments to deal with Greece and other economic crises, some in Europe have floated the idea of a European Monetary Fund (EMF) as an institutionalized “European solution” to such situations. However, any new EU or—more likely—eurozone institution faces some formidable political obstacles, which rule out an EMF [...]

Read full post

On February 25, Bank of Norway Governor Svein Gjedrem delivered an interesting and important speech at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He analyzed and critiqued multilateral approaches to today’s global economic challenges. He advocated: (1) effective collaboration by the systemically important countries; (2) anchoring such collaboration in a [...]

Read full post

In the latest phase of its financial melodrama, Greece successfully placed a €5 billion 10-year government bond in the financial markets on Thursday (March 4). The bond issue was heavily oversubscribed, but it still produced a high yield of approximately 6.3 percent (or approximately 300 basis points above the [...]

Read full post