surprising

Harry Markopolis's ideas on how to fix the SEC :

‘Too Many Attorneys’

“My bet is that Ms. Schapiro will find that she has too many attorneys and too few professionals with any sort of financial background,” he said.

I don't know about this report. It concludes that nobody high-up improperly influenced SEC action/inaction; instead, it throws lots of junior, "inexperienced" people under the bus, and when it identifies supervisors who did screw up, it doesn't name them. Why not? How else are we supposed to find out whether they're still screwing up somewhere else? Also, there is no explanation of why the investigators who wrote the report concluded that the supervisors didn't purposely tank the investigations. Bernie Madoff was a highly-connected, powerful person; it doesn't seem unreasonable to consider the possibility that he could have used his money and power to influence behavior at the SEC. This report doesn't seem even to consider the possibility. I find that surprising.

When you've tried over, and over, and over again to get a response to your claim, to no avail, is it time for a lawyerly demand letter? Or is it time to write a song and post a music video on YouTube?

"I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses [the song "Hallelujah," by Leonard Cohen]," Cohen is quoted as saying in a recent interview ..., "And the reviewer said 'Can we please have a moratorium on "Hallelujah" in movies and television shows?' And I kind of feel the same way." More

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Inspiring article in New Scientist about "The dam that broke the Berlin Wall": "We announced that we didn't accept censorship. We would act as if we were living in a democracy"

Interesting article here about strategies that owners are using to restructure existing loans: "What we are finding now is that--because on CMBS loans the companies cannot get any response from the master servicer--the only way of trying to renegotiate is to default because only a special servicer can modify the loan."
 

James Fallows of Atlantic on USA leadership on clean energy:

On energy, a disturbing factlet. (And obviously not the only disturbing observation on the energy-and-climate front.) I heard three people separately observe that when it comes to future sources of "clean" energy, there is not a single field in which U.S. companies are the technical or market leaders.

We're about to find out. As Ian Ritter notes today in his Counter Culture blog,

Some of the entities that financed some of the General Growth Properties’ malls want those assets taken out of the REIT’s bankruptcy filing ... Metropolitan Life Insurance, for one, takes issue with the inclusion of White Marsh Mall, in Baltimore.

In a fascinating story first printed in Stanford Magazine, former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Brooksley E. Born recounts her 1996 lunch with Alan Greenspan during which he told her

“Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don’t think there is any need for a law against fraud,” she recalls. Greenspan, Born says, believed the market would take care of itself.

Would it surprise you to know that a one-page "Final Proposal" that is "subject ...  to the terms and agreement of a formal agreement" is a binding contract that's going to cost the buyer over $14.4M (more than $20M, with interest)? Well, the buyer certainly seems to be surprised; incredulous, in fact.