Posts by Charles R. Morris

Merrill Lynch — the former Wall Street titan that was recently acquired by Bank of America — like most investment banks, typically pays about 50 percent of its revenue in compensation. The chart (after the jump) depicts Merrill’s revenue and compensation data since 2000 — and it demonstrates that the Wall Street giant dramatically broke [...]

The recession is getting worse, with the jobless count steadily rising and credit markets still far from operating smoothly. A big part of the problem is that government bailouts are encouraging banks to mask the extent of their balance-sheet problems. It’s time for the banks to come clean if the economy is going to restart.

Volcker is celebrated as the Federal Reserve chairman who broke the plague of global inflation in the early 1980s. But he did it be engineering a violent crackdown on excess credit. Why a ‘Burkean’ conservative can support this Democratic nominee.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spent his academic career studying the Great Depression. But this economic meltdown is uncharted territory. It turns out the Fed already guaranteed $650 billion even before Congress ok’d that $700-billion bailout.

Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson tried to push Congress into accepting the administration’s bailout plan. But the House pushed back. Hard.

Wall Street is lobbying hard on a bill it sees as a gold mine.

The stock market leaped giddily in late Thursday’s trading on rumors that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. is thinking of “a government-led plan that would bail out the banks in a Resolution Trust Corp.-type scenario,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal’s “MarketBeat” blog.
Yearnings for an “RTC-type solution” that could hold failing mortgages over [...]

Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson saved AIG to avoid a brutal restructuring of the credit default swap market.

GOP candidate’s Libertarian free-market proposals seek smaller government and tax cuts for big business.

First in a two-part series on what to expect on the economy from each presidential candidate.