So What Else Is Too Big To Fail?

I would guess that, prior to the recent World Economic Meltdown (WEM), most of us never gave much thought to which industries were “too big to fail”.  Who knew we couldn’t live without AIG or Bank of America?  Insurance companies and banks come and go, right?  It turns out that this rule only applies to [...]

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Is American Capitalism a Failure?

Failure is very much in the eye of the beholder, because whenever there are winners there are also losers.  Winners always think that things are just great, but the losers often have a different opinion.  If there are lots more winners than losers we can usually say that something is a success, and when things [...]

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Vampire Banks Come Back to Life

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winning economist, is fond of using the term “Zombie banks” to describe banks that are operating despite having liabilities that exceed their assets.  Most of our major banks have fallen into this category – the living dead.  However, it seems that the situation is changing with the Obama/Geithner rescue plan [...]

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America’s Aviation Industry in Crisis

The collapse of the real estate markets, the banking industry, and the automobile industry over the past year has been the subject of news headlines almost every day. However, there is an other segment of the economy that has received scant attention, yet there is another industry that has also fallen to its knees: the [...]

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AIG:Too Big to Fail – Too Big to Exist

If you bought AIG stock about ten days ago, you could have quadrupled your money by today.  It doesn’t make much sense, does it?  Why are people buying AIG while the U.S. Congress sounds like they are about to eat AIG for lunch?  There is either some serious irrational exuberance going on among investors or [...]

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