Follow up on regulators

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 18, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Hello again, In yesterday’s post, “a proposal for change, part II,” I said of the leaders and ideas of regulators needing to change: “Regulatory agencies also need to change. Their primary sin in both the dot.com era, and the mortgage bubble era, was that they lacked the spine to reign in drunken frat-boy behavior. This is largely a leadership issue. Unfortunately, the...
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IBM making a bid for Sun Microsystems

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 18, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Hello all, A very brief posting this morning. IBM is bidding to buy Sun Microsystems. As I said in a blog posting earlier this month, businesses are starting to behave to the financial market conditions in a rational manner. They are deploying their cash and cash equivalents to buy rival companies whose shares of stock are on sale due to the collapse of the stock markets. Think about what it...
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A proposal for change, part II

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 17, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 3 comments A week ago I published the first part of, what I called, “a proposal for change, part I.” Here is part II of that missive. Recall that in the first part of this post I addressed the Institutions that needed changing if the economy was to regain a firm footing and start to recover. Today’s post deals with the final two elements of the economy that need to change. Namely, the...
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Staggered board terms

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 16, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments Huh? What are “staggered board terms?” They are a little understood evil that has strongly contributed to the financial crisis and resulting recession. Let me explain. Was the financial crisis caused by poor financial institutions management decisions? Yes. Then fire the idiots! Unfortunately, that is harder than it sounds. Who has the authority to fire a poor-performing executive?...
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Overview of the proposed regulatory changes

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 16, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments I feel as if the talk of regulatory change is one of the most important national discussions taking place right now. Count on continued updates here on ze blog outlining the proposed steps. The rumbling in the District of Columbia is as follows: giving the Federal Reserve new powers, including… – the ability to monitor broad risks that could potentially affect the economy – the...
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A wee bit of progress

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 16, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments The major stock indices have rallied, with the whole thing starting off last Tuesday. Encouragingly, there has been good news circulating to accompany the rally. For example, AIG has disclosed where it spent its bailout monies. While distressing to some, transparency helps to reestablish trust, even if your particular take on the AIG fund distribution is negative. Additionally, we are getting...
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Index fund volatility

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 13, 2009 in Blog | 0 comments A relatively quick missive… There have been several academic studies that have tried to track the effect of index funds on the upward momentum of the stock market. In case you didn’t know, an index fund is a mutual fund designed so that its performance very closely matches that of a financial market index. The most popular of these sorts of funds track the performance of the S&P...
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