Societe Generale recently published a white paper that purports to be a "worst-case-scenario" of economic predictions, but which ultimately makes a persuasive case for an economic meltdown akin to that experienced by Japan throughout its "lost decade" of the 1990's....

The many layers of Scott Rothstein's Ponzi scheme continue to be peeled back, revealing a tangled web of Madoff-like feeder funds, alleged co-conspirators, and vast sums of money being transferred throughout the world. The Miami Herald reports, here, that Rothstein...

As Wall Street became the destination of choice for MIT and Harvard mathematicians and physicists throughout the last decade, alarm bells should have sounded at our regulatory and policy-making institutions. An interesting op-ed piece by Calvin Trillin appeared in the...

It bears worth repeating that the most interesting aspect of many of the recent Ponzi schemes that have surfaced, among them Bernie Madoff's and Scott Rothstein's, is not the motivation that propelled these individuals to commit these frauds, but the rationale of...

Is there any doubt that the federal government is now propping up nearly the entire housing market? The New York Times reported here that the Federal Housing Administration, FHA, the government agency whose loan-insurance programs have essentially prevented the entire...

Another week, another Ponzi scheme emerges: Scott Rothstein, a prominent Broward County, Florida lawyer, has been accused of orchestrating a scheme to bilk investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. The ruse involved the sale of legal settlements finalized by...

The greatest failure of the last two years is not the collapse of the securitized mortgage markets or the housing collapse that spawned them, but the failure of faulty risk analysis that continues to permeate the financial industry. The financial industry became...

Denial is a powerful emotion, especially when coupled with an avalanche of media hype and feel-good sensationalism. Our economy has just weathered the most severe downturn in 70 years, and it's business as usual for Wall Street and bankers. The increasing disconnect...

The collective failures of the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme and the collapse of the real estate markets share one common thread: the unwillingness of most commercial investors to perform even basic due diligence on their asset purchases. I'll start with Bernie Madoff's...