American Madness

Intelligent Criticism in the Service of a Better Nation

McSweeney’s: Atlas Shrugged updated for
the current financial crisis

ATLAS SHRUGGED UPDATED FOR THE CURRENT FINANCIAL CRISIS.
“Damn it, Dagny! I need the government to get out of the way and let me do my job!”
She sat across the desk from him. She appeared casual but confident, a slim body with rounded shoulders like an exquisitely engineered truss. How he hated his debased need for [...]

American Bankers have no shame

The Moral Stage of Wall Street from The New Yorker. Thanks, Ben.
Swiss bankers are not known as paragons of transparency and moral accountability, so it’s a nice surprise to read that the top officials of UBS, the foundering financial institution recently bailed out by the Swiss government, will forgo twenty-seven million dollars in compensation and [...]

Self sufficiency on the NYTimes boards

As Matt points out, “Damn, that’s an impressive comment“:
A middle-aged man stopped me in the store yesterday, pointed to the fresh pineapples in my cart and asked me if I was going to prepare them myself. He had a small, “cored” pineapple in his cart and noticed that it cost more than the two large [...]

We don’t need greater transparency on Wall Street

All this talk about greater transparency is just a load of bull.
“The financial crisis highlights the need for greater transparency and oversight, but there has to be a balance. Overregulation could hurt the securities industry, which is vitally important to the State and the City.”
- Thomas DiNapoli in today’s report on Wall Street
If some [...]

Playing chicken with 3 million jobs

The ruse just might work because the Bush administration has established a pattern of responding to the troubled economy by throwing tens of billions of dollars at large banks without asking how the taxpayer’s money will be spent.

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    As with Anna Karina, we prefer to remember the U.S.A as she was in the 1960s.

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