Archive for Chidem Kurdas
Chidem Kurdas is a financial journalist and economist in New York. She writes about investing for HedgeFundSmarts.com and about policy for ThinkMarkets.com.
Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves
Books about the 2008 financial crisis keep coming, and New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin offers one of the better accounts of the meltdown. Using a large number of interviews, he reconstructs the words and acts of key people during the six months from the near-collapse of Bear Stearns in March to the bankruptcy [...]
24Feb2011 | Chidem Kurdas | 0 comments | ContinuedFinancial Regulation Snake Oil
Recent turmoil set off by the threat of Greek insolvency shows how fast markets change. Fear about the inability of European governments to pay their debts caused the 2010 turbulence. By contrast, the 2008–2009 havoc was rooted in the collapse of property values. The next crisis will be about something else, possibly another government’s debt. [...]
25Aug2010 | Chidem Kurdas | 1 comment | ContinuedA Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression
Richard Posner’s latest book belongs to the fast-expanding cottage industry of financial crisis books. A federal judge with a grounding in economics, Posner would seem to be an ideal person to tackle this complicated subject. Alas, he provides neither fresh material nor an interesting perspective. Posner describes well-known events—the failure of investment banks Bear Stearns [...]
5Jan2010 | Chidem Kurdas | 1 comment | ContinuedFinancial Crises and the Federal Reserve’s Punch Bowl
Why did the U.S. financial system nearly collapse last year? People blame Wall Street’s excessive greed and risk-taking. But without easy money, the massive risk-taking could not have happened. To be sure, financial firms leveraged up—that is, they did a lot of business with borrowed money. That juiced up revenues and bonuses in the boom—and [...]
18Nov2009 | Chidem Kurdas | 12 comments | ContinuedRegulation Will Stop Future Madoffs? It Just Ain’t So!
Bernard Madoff is a boon to financial regulation advocates. A well-known Wall Street figure, he confessed to defrauding his clients of $50 billion, an amazing number. It is now established conventional wisdom, blared across the media, that this and other financial disasters would likely not have happened had there been proper government supervision. With deregulation [...]
24Apr2009 | Chidem Kurdas | 8 comments | Continued-
The Latest
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Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market
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Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
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