On Sunday, October 25th 2009, Jeffry Picower drowned in the swimming pool of his Palm Beach mansion, the victim of an apparent heart attack. His untimely death left in limbo, if not totally silenced, crucial questions about the role he played in what may be the greatest disappearance act in...

Don't cry (yet) for investors in Bernie Madoff's grand Ponzi scheme -- or at least for those of them who pay taxes. As bad as they may have done in their calculated effort to beat the system by betting with one of the stock exchange's major market makers, thanks to...

Harvard University's admission that it lost $8 billion from its $36 billion endowment fund, as staggering as it sounds, may grossly underestimate the true magnitude of the loss between from July 1 through Oct. 31 2008. According to a source close the Harvard Management Corporation (HMC), which runs the fund...

Countries may succeed in bailing-out their banks, but who will bail-out these countries? From tiny Iceland (population 320,000), which is still on the verge of bankruptcy, to Pakistan (population 173 million), which is on the verge of running out of money to pay for imports, over a dozen countries are...

Fueled by low-interest mortgages, real estate prices in Japan had risen so high by the end of the 1980s that just the land under the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was nominally worth more than all the real estate in California. Then, in late 1989, the bubble burst and real estate...