July 2008

The Securities and Exchange Commission late yesterday announced it's extending its emergency ban on naked short selling in 19 financial companies through August 12, noting this will be the last extension of the rules. That means the SEC will continue its regulatory apartheid by refusing to bend to requests by bankers associations to widen the rules to cover more financial concerns, with no ... read more

The forecasters who thought investors should now pile into the financials, that the sector would start seeing an upward trend, now know the pain of betting on a false bottom. Merrill Lynch's shocking announcement after the market's close yesterday that it will book a huge pre-tax $5.7 bn writedown in its upcoming third quarter from its toxic securities and hedges with bond insurers, plus raise ... read more

Wall Street executives now expect the Securities and Exchange Commission to extend its temporary limits on a certain type of short selling beyond the 19 financial companies on its initial list, the Wall Street Journal says. However, the crackdown was problematic from the start, because, in a curious bit of regulatory apartheid, the list of 19 excluded a range of other financials, and because ... read more

Sweetheart mortgages given by Countrywide Financial, the nation's biggest mortgage lender, to elected officials and government bureaucrats seem tailor-made for an ethics inquiry by Congress, especially as the country is seeing a rising tide of voter anger in this presidential election year due to the massive $300 bn bailout of the housing industry at taxpayers' expense. The mortgages at issue ... read more

"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem... It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government." -- Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981 The moves by the government to calm the waters ... read more