David Callahan

One big question at the center of the private equity debate is whether firms like Bain Capital intentionally set out to burden the companies they take over with debt -- or whether things just sometimes go sour amid failed turnaround efforts.

Defenders of private equity say that piling up...

Is the Facebook initial public offering -- one of the largest IPOs in history -- a symbol of American prosperity? In some sense, yes. A technological innovation that began as an extracurricular obsession of a brilliant college student has now become a global "social utility" with 900 million users. In...

Last I checked, the United States was in the middle of a white collar crime wave -- with new revelations every day about wrongdoing by major financial institutions, billions lost to tax evasion, large-scale ripoffs of the government by private contractors, and an epidemic of

A seemingly immutable law of today's politics is that Republicans in Congress have shifted so far right that they oppose all revenue increases -- no matter how urgent America's fiscal needs may be.

But perhaps this is no longer the case.

In March, I argued that Republicans would...

Eric Schneiderman has big shoes to fill as New York State Attorney General. Eliot Spitzer famously used this post to crack down on Wall Street after the excesses of the dot com era, going after the likes of Henry Blodget and AIG's Hank Greenberg. Schneiderman's immediate predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, busted...

Repealing tax breaks for oil companies is a great idea, but Democrats need to do a better job of explaining why.

It's not enough to argue, as Senator Bob Menendez has, that "we need everyone to do their share to lower the deficit" or that taxpayers shouldn't...

Here we go again. With gas prices spiking, oil companies and pandering politicians are once again arguing that it's time to open up more coastal areas and Alaskan wilderness to drilling.

Self-reliance is a strong American value, so it's no surprise that such talk resonates with people who are...

Two things stand out about President Obama's visit to Facebook yesterday for a town hall hosted by Mark Zuckerberg.

One is that Obama was there in the first place. In effect, Zuckerberg and Facebook gave the President a high profile venue in which to beat up on Republican...

These are not great times for workers -- or for unions. One bright spot, though, are new laws that protect workers from being cheated out of their wages. On April 9, New York will become the largest state yet to enact a law designed to reduce wage theft...

Was the 2012 presidential election just decided by the Republican-controlled legislature in Ohio? It is possible. Two days ago, the state's House of Representatives passed one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country. If the bill is enacted into law, it will make it harder...

I've dug into plenty of plagiarism incidents involving reporters over the years, but I'll confess that I'm totally stumped by the case of Sari Horwitz.

Yesterday, the Washington Post issued an apologetic statement saying that two articles in the paper about the Arizona shooting rampage "contained substantial material...

There is no test that looms larger in the lives of young Americans than the SAT. Even though over 700 colleges no longer require the SAT for admission, it still plays a major role in the college admissions process and looms large over the lives of millions of anxious American...

The extension of tax cuts for the wealthy has stalled efforts to use federal fiscal policy to reduce economic inequality, a chasm now so large that even Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke recently said it was creating "two societies." Progressives shouldn't give up on the push to rewrite a...

Around the country, college professors are sitting down with stacks of final papers and blue book exams to be graded. And, as happens every semester, quite a few professors will experience a sinking feeling when they stumble upon written passages that don't seem right. Maybe they will be tipped off...

The routine is now maddeningly familiar: The U.S. Justice Department announces that some huge drug company has broken the law and defrauded government healthcare programs of tens of millions of dollars. Prosecutors use terms like "illegal kickbacks" and "conspiracy" to describe the schemes they have discovered. And large financial penalties...

High levels of student cheating have been the norm on college campuses for years now and a big reason is that schools don't take tougher action to address this problem. As I wrote in a previous post "all evidence suggests that most university leaders do not focus much...

A persistent puzzle about financial crimes is that they often involve fabulously rich executives or traders who risk everything to do even better. The rest of us can only wonder: Just what, exactly, are these people thinking?

That question came up often during the insider trading scandals of the...

The huge cheating scandal at the University of Central Florida may have shocked some observers, but the crisis of academic integrity is hardly news. Surveys have revealed for years that between two-thirds and three-quarters of college students cheat. Countless media stories have reported on the problem. And, if...

When Richard Quinn, a business professor at the University of Central Florida, accused many of his students of cheating earlier this month, he probably didn't expect to find himself at the center of a national media story. Nor did he probably imagine that he would be cast as the villain...

(Update: See my profile of Todd Deutsch, who was named in the Wall Street Journal article as a possible target of the federal probe.)

It is never good to hear that large financial players may have broken the law, and the huge insider trading investigation unfolding...