Ward on Words

Joe Nocera's column takes a look at Jamie Dimon's "very long day." It was a "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day" ( LOVE that book ! ) for Dimon because it included fines of more than $1 billion - $920 million to appease for overwhelming splash of the London Whale, and $389 in fines and restitution for "selling bogus services" to its credit card customers. FINALLY, a bank is forced to pay for its criminally foolishness behavior! But it's 2013 - banks have long been acting criminally foolish - why have there been no real fines up to now? (I simply cannot accept the $550 million fine $GS had to pay for the fraudulent Abacus deal as being a serious and significant fine for a company with $13.4 billion in profit that very same year.) So why so long before seeing a relatively serious fine for extremely serious infractions? Nocera attributes this to "unfortunate timing." Had the Whale flopped in 2009, the government would h...

Guess what! After news reports focused attention on the company's unnecessary hoarding practices of metal, Goldman Sachs now pledges a way to make the delays disappear. The news is too late for at least one institution that decided to change a key business practice due to the recent high costs of metal.   I wonder how this will change Goldman's strategic outlook on metals. Perhaps metals are not so lucrative now that the artificial shortage is alleviated?   Metals are not the only market Goldman likes to manipulate. Goldman's sacrificial lamb has been found liable in the massive CDO fraud case that lost one of its clients $1 billion as the same deal gained another client an equal sum. And there are other recent stories about the damage inflicted by Goldman in other areas:  HuffPo notes Goldman's " predatory pursuit of students " in higher ed Washington Post shares Goldman's " long history of duping clients A blogger discusses Goldman a...

Two years ago, I moved from Illinois to North Carolina. It was a jarring move - I'm a life-time resident of the Land of Lincoln, a state where politics are considered a true sporting event. Yet despite the state-wide passion for political sport, governance of that state is at an all-time low. Governors tend to end up in jail. Illinois is facing a terrible fiscal crisis caused by unfunded pensions. Pat Quinn, Illinois' current governor, is now withholding legislator salaries until the passage of pension reform; House Speaker Mike Madigan, the most powerful man in the state, has filed suit because he wants his paycheck regardless of whether or not a significant, long-term problem is solved for the state. Because of the serious and ongoing political issues of Illinois, I was, to be frank, looking forward to a change of pace.  And the Tar Heel state CERTAINLY has provided that for me... in spades! The GOP has taken charge - and as a colleague told me the other day, the state to...

Americans, dragged down by a sagging economy, high unemployment and a rather astonishing number of people living at risk of poverty , have new reality show to watch: Hoarders - the bank holding company version. Emboldened by bonuses supplied by the US taxpayer and bolstered by the lack of any oversight or consequences for reprehensible behaviors on Wall Street that led to the collapse of the economy, America's biggest " bank holding companies " are expanding their businesses. No longer content to supply loans and CDOs and synthetic CDOs , those clever Ivy-educated bankers are in the commodities storage business. And they're hoarding these commodities like those hoarders you can watch on A&E. What does this mean? Your cans of Pepsi, Budweiser and Heineken have just gotten pricier. And the hoarders on Wall Street have just gotten richer. This Business Insider story quotes a Goldman Sachs "commodities strategist" on how  "for investors, the...

The North Carolina General Assembly (NCGA) has been exceptionally busy this week. They passed a budget that trashes primary and secondary education - siphons money from public schools to charter schools, offers no raises to teachers (who've been without a raise for years), offers no incentives for teachers to get a masters degree; removes the possibility of tenure from new hires. And that's just education. And it follows remarks McCrory made earlier in the year about higher education in North Carolina, home to the first public university in the country: “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it,” McCrory told host Bill Bennett, a former U.S. Secretary of Education. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job." They've just passed one of the most restrictive voter ID bills in recent history (THANK YOU SCOTUS, NOT!) They've also passed one of the most alarming gun bills in America - ...

David Brooks was probably feeling very smart and intellectual and clever when he posted his most recent column . He links a great John Ford Western with a look at manhood today in America; he covers current unemployment stats, reflects on boy culture and school culture; he quotes the American Enterprise Institute along with lines from The Searchers . It's all in there. The column is a muddled mess. He opens with a rather vast claim: "As every discerning person knows, The Searchers is the greatest movie ever made." Now I think we can say that discerning people know The Searchers is one of the greatest movies ever made. [I make that claim myself here .] But to assert as fact that it is the very greatest film ever made and to note that if you don't get that fact, you are not a discerning person - which is disdainful and argumentative - is perhaps not the best way to open this column. He goes on to note that the close of the West has left American manhood in a...

Two days ago, as we were watching Saige: An American Girl , our program was interrupted to give us the verdict in a trial reflecting today's American zeitgeist - that violent and bloodied intersection of guns and race, the George Zimmerman trial. It was a very jarring end to the sugar-sweet American Girl story about the travails of a 9-year-old artist. My children were upset; they wanted to see the end of the movie; instead we all watched the verdict. Today, as I ponder the news and analysis of this trial, I remain melancholy. Was it appropriate to let my 9-year-olds watch the verdict? What about my 13-year old? I remain torn about this. I know that as the verdict was announced, my three children wanted to know what happened. What was this trial about - a trial so significant it cut into the conclusion of an American Girl movie? After I explained the details, they did not understand how an armed adult could kill an unarmed teenager and be considered "not guilty." In o...

David Brooks has a post on the decline of the humanities. He seems not to understand that educating students to think critically has been under attack for quite some time now. His president, GW Bush, focused money and attention on "teaching to the test." It has been a cataclysmic failure. Of course for Brooks, the Ivies are the benchmark. Brooks notes: "Even over the last decade alone, the number of incoming students at Harvard who express interest in becoming humanities majors has dropped by a third." Brooks seems not to understand that that Ivies are the food source for the Wall Street Banks. An Ivy education focused on the humanities is not the best for those voracious enough to drag down the US economy and then expect a bonus as a result. But the focus on the big bucks is not to blame. According to Brooks, humanities professors have "lost faith..."  "Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting missio...