That’s what the US Department of Treasury may be telling investors in the near future.  What that effectively means is that the rate the US pays to borrow money would be negative.  Investors would be paying the US for the privilege to lend to them?  How can this happen in a world where our debt [...]

Does this statement disturb you? In 1950, finance and insurance in the United States accounted for 2.8% of GDP, according to US Department of Commerce estimates. By 1960, that share had grown to 3.8% of GDP, and reached 6% of GDP in 1990. Today, it is 8.4% of GDP, and it is not shrinking. The [...]

Times are rough in a number of European countries.  Much like in 2008 here in the US, credit markets are tightening across the pond.  But, whereas things froze overnight here, there things are just tight; like your pants usually are in January.  And like the US the banks are  cutting back on lending and only [...]

There are some elements of finance that even I struggle with.  For example, how can you draw a line from a wheat farmer in Nebraska to a bankrupt brokerage in New-York City?  Maybe that connection is easy, but why is the farmer’s money missing just because the farmer’s brokerage company went bankrupt?  And why are [...]

Even though Occupy Wall Street has lost some of its muster, the message has been loud and clear, people are pissed off.  The easiest target has been Wall Street, and it will likely remain that way for some time.  They certainly deserve a lot of the blame, blame they’ve been getting since 2007.  Over the [...]

Yesterday, a couple of financial blogs linked to a wall post on Reddit, a website that last I saw was where you go to see cool links to stuff, not where people post anonymous rants.  The Reddit post claims to be written by someone who works on Wall Street.  They go off on a long [...]

Hopefully by now you’ve heard of the meltdown and bankruptcy of MF Global.  MF Global was a commodity and futures broker (if you don’t know what that is don’t worry it’s not important) that Corzine ran from March of last year until last week. If you don’t know of Jon Corzine he’s well known amongst [...]

In the business world, there’s a term called “Voice of the Customer”, or “VOC“.  Some businesses ignore VOC while others devotes millions of dollars and resources to it.  I’ve seen the term used quite loosely, but essentially it refers to the process of capturing what the customer wants.  It serves as the check for which [...]