How to Cover Wall Street

Ponzi schemes and defrauded Manhattan hedge funds can be lots of fun, and are guaranteed to create ample water cooler chit chat for days. But to give the Bernie Madoff super-scandal a little bit of context – and help you really impress over cocktails during the holiday party season – here’s a handy-dandy chart I created that chronicles some of the more outrageous of single-handed Wall-Street money losers, stealers or swindlers over the past couple of decades. Let’s see how they stand up to Madoff:

Clearly, Wall Street ripoffs are only getting more outrageous, and Madoff’s crimes have had the farthest reach of all.

Greg, Steve and Damian all make good points. I’ll use my own experience to illustrate my take. When I was a waitress at a diner near the U.N., we had a steady trickle of international customers, most of whom were bad tippers (please excuse the broad national stereotypes for the purposes of instructional parable). The most extreme in their penuriousness, it must be said, were Brits, who would often nurse a $2.99 bowl of soup or $1 cup of tea for ages, and then leave a five or 10 percent gratuity.

The Comfort Diner

The reason wasn’t some unresolved resentment toward the colonies, nor do I think it can be attributed entirely to a lack of familiarity with local custom (Yes, tips are much more modest in your country, I wanted to scream, but you’ve got a guidebook – read it!). (more…)

Mundane trading days like Monday are now exotic and rare

Today was an incredible day for the markets. At the closing bell, the Dow had fallen a remarkable…five points. That’s about one-sixteenth of a percentage point, in case you were counting. The negligible stock movement may seem yawn-worthy at first blush, but in the new upside-down world, where markets soar and plunge in the thousand-point range, and swings of three, four and five hundred have become the norm, a mildly-swaying, low-volume trading day like today is way out of the ordinary.

In the halcyon days of two months ago (when we were just in a recession, not an apocalypse), a financial reporter would have cursed a day like today, because it would mean they’d have to really scrape and claw to find something to write about. Manufacturing is at its lowest level in a quarter-century, but the market hasn’t reacted. And traders don’t expect to be surprised by the country’s choice for leader of the free world. But parsing the minuscule stock movements of individual companies and industries and trying to extrapolate a unifying economic theory would, in the summer, have been tedious and unmemorable.

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With America’s economy pummeled and its financial system all but socialized, a once-unthinkable reality has dawned on the populace: we may not be the world’s only superpower for much longer.

True. But neither will anybody else.

Over the past year, the U.S. economy softened as that of two erstwhile underdogs emerged: India and China. Good money was on Russia and Brazil seeing increased economic strength, too. And as pundits marveled at the breakneck speed of these emerging economies’ growth, the thinly veiled subtext to their awe was, “how much trouble are we in?”

China and India presented a real threat to America’s status as top economic dogs, and it stood to reason that our power might recede as theirs rose. Then came the fall of 2008.
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