Quelle Surprise! It’s Better to Run a Private Equity Fund than Invest in One
It's perverse that it takes a Mitt Romney presidential bid to shed some long-overdue harsh light on the private equity industry.
It was not as hard as you might think to do well in the private equity business in the 1990s. Rising equity markets lift all boats, and PE is levered equity. A better test...
Greece Poised to Default
By Delusional Economics, who is horrified at the state of economic commentary in Australia and is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from
GAO Goes After Administration “TARP Made Money” Claim
I don't know how many times we've gone after the "TARP made a profit" bunk, but that topic requires an annoying amount of vigilance (the latest shill was Austan Gooslbee a mere week ago).
American Exceptionalism and Euro-Bashing, Adam Davidson Style
Adam Davidson has an article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, "The Other Reason Europe is Going Broke," that manages the impressive feat of making you stupider than before you read it. It misrepresents most of the few facts it contains in appealing to American prejudices about our cultural, or in this case,...
Extreme Predictions 2012
I tend to avoid the year end retrospective/forecast blizzard, although some of the more creative compilations can be fun.
However, some 2012 forecasts crossed my screen, and two were such striking outliers that I thought I'd call them to your attention and seeing if readers have come across other Extreme Predictions for the new year...
Doug Smith: One Way Journalism Paints Flawed Picture Of Poverty
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. Over 560 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or read about why we're doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate on our kickoff post and one discussing...
Steve Rattner, Card Carrying Member of Top 1%, Tells Us We Should Lie Back and Enjoy Much Lower Wages Resulting From Globalization
A corollary to Upton Sinclair's famous saying, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on his not understanding it" is "People promote ideas that help them secure or preserve a privileged position on the totem pole."
A glaring example of these observations came in an op ed in...
Philip Pilkington: The Irish Establishment – Mad as Goats?
By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland 
Learn to say the same thing What defeats people is a double confession One time they will confess one thing And the next they will confess something else Talk to them, they will say: Learn to say the same thing Let...
Study Asserts World’s Stocks Controlled by “Select Few” (Bad Studies That Confirm Conventional Wisdom Refuse to Die Edition)
Wow, there is nothing like searching through your archives for an anecdote you want to recycle only to discover that the post you used it in pre-debunked the very same paper that you are now girding up to debunk.
A whole bunch of readers sent me either links to a paper "The Network for...
