this is an adventure

This is Bakouma Kpatekatola, a young man from the West African nation of Togo. In 2003, when Bakouma was 9 years old, my family became his sponsor through the Childreach-Plan USA organization. In the years since we became occasional pen pals; a few times a year we’d get a letter from him, in his native […]

Feb. 19, 2009 | WASHINGTON — The Obama administration seems to have learned three big lessons in salesmanship from the bumps it endured in passing the stimulus bill and presenting its Wall Street rescue plan. One, sometimes the best way to sell Washington on an idea is to leave Washington and talk to the public. […]

Steven Malanga examines the real problem with the housing plan. New mortgages are now being issued only under exceptionally stringent underwriting standards. The market has far overcorrected for the excesses of the bubble years, and adding new regulations to control new issuance doesn’t change reality.

How do these frauds keep churning onward with such obvious holes? “One of the biggest alleged frauds in banking history had been stumbled upon accidentally late last year by Alex Dalmady, a Venezuelan financial analyst, when he was doing a favor for a friend who planned to invest in Stanford International Bank.”