NewsTrust - Corporate Governance - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

JPMorgan Chase’s $2 Billion Loss

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - May. 13 (Editorial) - The lesson of JPMorgan’s stunning $2 billion trading loss is that the banks haven’t learned their lesson, and neither have the politicians. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, can be clear as a bell when he denounces financial reform. But on an emergency conference call with analysts on Thursday to announce the bank’s stunning $2 billion trading loss, his message was frustratingly vague.

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Capitalists and Other Psychopaths

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By William Deresiewicz - May. 12 (Opinion) - is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

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Income inequality does matter

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

USA Today - By Philip Meyer - Mar. 27 (Opinion) - Despite its emergence as a concern in the 2012 presidential campaign, the issue of income inequality does not bother most of us. Maybe we haven't thought about it enough. A recent Gallup Poll found that only 46% believe it "extremely important" or "very important" for the federal government to enact policies that would reduce the gap between rich and poor.

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The Good, Bad and Ugly of Capitalism

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Joe Nocera - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - Goldman Sachs displayed one side of capitalism this week that seemed to strike a chord with many. Starbucks is displaying a different side.

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How will technology influence the news in 2012?

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Dan Gillmor - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - Predicting the next year's news is a fool's errand, but looking at technological trends could give us a hint At the beginning of 2011, aging dictators ruled Egypt and Libya, and despotism was the nearly unquestioned reality in most of the Middle East. The eurozone was seeing trouble at its edges, but wasn't heading toward collapse. News International had successfully covered up most of its rampant bad acts, and Rupert Murdoch was on the verge of even greater control over British media and politics. Anyone who might have predicted how utterly and rapidly those realities would change might have been branded a lunatic. Which is one reason why the annual journalistic ritual of making predictions about the year ahead is a fool's errand. With that in mind, let me offer instead some observations about the technology and media trends we've seen in past months, and how they might play out in 2012. In many cases, the trajectory is deeply worrisome. But I remain an eternal optimist in the face of ...

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Murdoch's malign influence must die with the News of the World

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Jul. 10 (Editorial) - The scandal over phone hacking has exposed a rotten empire and the urgent need for stronger press regulation Suddenly, Rupert Murdoch seems much less a global mogul, much more a diminished man of glass. He flies into London this weekend from Sun Valley, Idaho, in time for the last rites of the most successful Sunday newspaper in Britain, the News of the World . One hundred and sixty-eight years ago, it pledged: "Our motto is the truth, our practice is fearless advocacy of the truth." After today, the tabloid will appear no more, felled not by one royal rogue reporter but by the arrogance, ambition and apparent tolerance of systemic criminal behaviour by members of the senior News International management. The loss of a newspaper, especially one with a proud history of award-winning investigative journalism, is a cause for sadness. The News of the World was the biggest-selling Sunday tabloid in the English-speaking world. The death of a paper in such rude health is unprecedented and ...

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The People vs. Goldman Sachs

Fri, 13 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - May. 13 (Editorial) - To recap: Goldman, to get $1.2 billion in crap off its books, dumps a huge lot of deadly mortgages on its clients, lies about where that crap came from and claims it believes in the product even as it's betting $2 billion against it. When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.

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Fixes: A Scorecard for Companies With a Conscience

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Tina Rosenberg - Apr. 12 (Opinion) - The law states that the duty of a business’s directors is to maximize profits for shareholders. Obviously, there are many ways to maximize profits; even costly socially responsible activities can do just that in the long term. But when a business is on the block, there is often no more long term for shareholders. The difference in the prices offered by Hot Fudge Partners and Unilever offered was too great. The directors of Ben and Jerry’s felt that if they had accepted the lower offer, they could have expected a lawsuit from shareholders — which they would likely have lost. The company was acquired by Unilever in April 2000. Ben and Jerry’s is far from alone. The typical pattern for a new, successful, triple-bottom-line company is that it quickly gets gobbled up by a major corporation

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US economics: One big Ponzi scheme

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Aljazeera - By Danny Schlecter - Feb. 20 (Opinion) - While Bernie Madoff languishes in jail, bankers continue to profit as the poor lose their homes and hope.

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The Crying Shame of John Boehner

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Jan. 06 (Opinion) - John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich. The biographer who somewhere down the line tackles the question of Boehner's legacy will do well to simply throw out any references to party affiliation, because the thing that has made Boehner who he is — the thing that has finally lifted him to the apex of legislative power in America — has almost nothing to do with his being a Republican.

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Corporate land grabs threaten food security

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - By Danielle Nierenberg, Ronit Ridberg - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - Wealthy countries are buying up farm land in poorer countries with global consequences. These controversial land grabs hurt local workers and ecosystems, and dangerously tip the scale of the world's food economy.

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Republicans, the corporate cult

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By David Horsey - Jul. 06 (Opinion) - Which is it? Are Congressional Republicans cynical or obtuse? Are they pandering to anti-government, pro-business fanatics or are they, themselves, fanatics? Case in point: The trumped-up charge that the Obama administration is sucking up to organized labor by failing to waive the Jones Act so that foreign vessels can be brought in to help the oil spill cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico. In plain terms, it's a lie.

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Disaster in the Amazon

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Bob Herbert - Jun. 05 (Opinion) - “As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse,” said Jonathan Abady, a New York lawyer who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants. It has been a long and ugly legal

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Bilderberg 2010: Between the sword and the wall

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Charlie Skelton - Jun. 05 (Opinion) - The Catalan police are refreshingly friendly. But if the time for action comes, whose side will they be on? The enormous bald detective in beach shorts took the camera from my wife. "Let me see." He scrolled through the photographs, just taken, of me being detained at the campsite gates. He scrolled past, to see a photo of a limousine convoy, whooshing up the hill to Bilderberg. "I don?t like this," he said, and waved a huge, disgruntled hand towards the conference hotel. "Do you know how much this is costing?" asked Hannah. "Do you think the Spanish economy can afford all this?" Grimly, the enormous bald detective started deleting images of his comrades with his giant thumb. "Your opinion," he growled, "is right." He handed the ...

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Legislating a Conscience on Wall Street

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Michael Hirsh - Apr. 28 (Opinion) - Lloyd Blankfein doesn't seem to feel responsible for anything beyond Goldman Sachs’s bottom line. Nor should he, according to the meager mores of Wall Street. Goldman, you see, is a "market maker," as Blankfein loves to repeat. This absolves the firm of any fiduciary responsibility for the deals it sets up for its clients. Creating "liquidity" in the markets, Blankfein believes, is Goldman’s only social responsibility. At a hearing of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on Tuesday, Chairman Carl Levin repeatedly tried to get Blankfein to concede that Goldman was morally wrong to bet on the sly against securities that it had touted as solid investments to its clients. No, no, no, the Goldman CEO demurred, that's not how the financial system works any more. "There's been a change in the sociology of the business in the last 10 to 15 years," Blankfein explained patiently. "Somewhere along the line," he said, big clients stopped asking investment banks for good advice and started to seek them out only to set up deals for them—merely to underwrite the transactions and be on the other side of them. That forced Goldman to transform itself from a private partnership in the late '90s into a publicly traded company in order to obtain the big-time capital it needed to create such deals. It also apparently gave Goldman carte blanche to shaft any helpless investor on the other side of those transactions. Liquidity is all. Nothing else matters.

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Lehman's collapse was all its own fault

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Michael Hiltzik - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - The bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. in September 2008 is widely seen as the event that kicked the financial meltdown into high gear.

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The corporate shell game

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Hill - By Bob Franken - Feb. 16 (Opinion) - Where no expense is spared is what it takes to keep Washington at bay. Spreading a few bucks around to all the willing politicians works wonders at keeping the United States from reordering corporate policy and regulation.

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The double standard at CBS

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist - Feb. 06 (Opinion) - ...CBS’s decision to air an ad featuring Florida football star Tim Tebow. The ad, funded by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, features the decision by Tebow’s mother to reject the advice of doctors to have an abortion when she was very sick while the future Heisman Trophy winner was in her womb. That story is an unqualified, beautiful individual testament to faith and love. But Focus on the Family wants to twist the free choice of this mother into a political vehicle to eliminate choice for all other women... ...they accepted that ad while rejecting a Super Bowl ad for a gay dating service. The ad starts with one man in a Green Bay Packers jersey and the other in a Minnesota Vikings shirt cheering against each other. It ends with them making out on the couch. By accepting the Focus on the Family ad in this context, CBS gives its political blessing to an organization that spends tremendous energy specifically excluding gay couples from full citizenship, and, with its support of conservative Supreme Court nominees, opposes full equality for people of color and women. It is a window to the future under the court’s bitterly divided 5-4 ruling that frees corporations to spend unlimited money on political campaigns.

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Those who caused the economic meltdown are still in denial

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By Paul Krugman - Dec. 15 (Opinion) - Given recent economic history, you might have expected the emergence of a national consensus in favor of restoring more-effective financial regulation. But you would have been wrong.

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A Heroine of ’Capitalism’

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Lois Romano - Oct. 07 (Interview) - Elizabeth Warren is far from a household name, but that could change quickly, given her debut on the big screen this week in Michael Moore’s scathing assessment of the government’s handling of the banking crisis.

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Give BB&T Liberty, but Not a Bailout

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Andrew Martin - Aug. 02 (Interview) - If Mr. Allison’s speech sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who celebrated the virtues of reason, self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism while maintaining that altruism is a destructive force. In Ms. Rand’s world, nothing is more heroic — and sexy — than a hard-working businessman free to pursue his wealth. And nothing is worse than a pesky bureaucrat trying to restrict business and redistribute wealth. Or, as Mr. Allison explained, “put balls and chains on good people, and bad things happen.”

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The Stumbles That Led to an Ethics Blunder

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Andrew Alexander - Jul. 12 (Opinion) - The Washington Post's ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record "salons" was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions. Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli have now taken full responsibility for what was envisioned as a series of 11 intimate dinners to discuss public policy issues. For a fee of up to $25,000, underwriters were guaranteed a seat at the table with lawmakers, administration officials, think tank experts, business leaders and the heads of associations. Promotional materials said Weymouth, Brauchli and at least one Post reporter would serve as "Hosts and Discussion Leaders" for an evening of spirited but civil dialogue. While Brauchli and Weymouth say they should have realized long ago that the plan was flawed, internal e-mails and interviews show questions about ethics were raised with both of them months ago. They also show that blame runs deeper. Beneath Brauchli and Weymouth, three of the most senior newsroom managers received an e-mail with details of the plan.

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Op-Ed Columnist - In Praise of Dullness

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Brooks - May. 19 (Opinion) - In other words, warm, flexible, team-oriented and empathetic people are less likely to thrive as C.E.O.’s. Organized, dogged, anal-retentive and slightly boring people are more likely to thrive.

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The Big Takeover

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Rolling Stone - By Matt Taibbi - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

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End Corporate Welfare

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Weekly Standard - By Matthew Continetti - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - When news broke last week that insurance giant AIG--into which the federal government has poured close to $200 billion since last September--planned to pay out $165 million in bonuses to executives in its financial products group, the backlash was swift. And understandable. These are the blockheads who pioneered the use of credit default swaps that purportedly allowed banks and other investors to hedge against losses in the secondary mortgage market. In so doing, they created new financial instruments and hence a new marketplace that, for a while anyway, flourished wildly. It didn't last. The real estate bubble popped and took the banking sector and AIG down with it. AIG didn't have the money to pay the counterparties to its swaps. The feds stepped in and began pumping cash into the insurer so it could pay its counterparties--the likes of European giants Deutsche Bank and Société Générale and Wall Street's Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. To do otherwise, sayeth the Treasury, would invite a "systemic collapse" of the swap market, and thereby the destruction of the firms who participated in it. Who knows what sort of financial apocalypse would ensue?

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