Forbes' (which bills itself as the "Capitalist Tool") publisher, Rich Karlgaard, writing in the Wall Street Journal, defends Apple's creation of a criminogenic environment that produces endemic anti-employee control fraud by its suppliers and unlawful and brutal working conditions that Apple refuses to stop.

How does a defense...

The New York Times is presenting a series of important articles by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher on Apple's overwhelming reliance on foreign suppliers. The first article ("How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work": January 21, 2012) was driven by this anecdote:

People will carry this phone...

On June 14, 2011, Emma Ruby-Sachs posted an article entitled "Prop 8 Lawyers Seek to Destroy America's Judiciary."

Her article argued that the lawyers seeking to uphold the constitutionality of Prop 8 (banning same sex marriage in California) sought to destroy America's judiciary when they moved to...

I can no longer say that not a single senior executive of one of the major nonprime lenders whose frauds hyper-inflated the housing bubble and caused the Great Recession has been convicted of his frauds. A single senior executive of one of the hundreds of fraudulent nonprime lenders

Freddie Mac made a terse announcement Wednesday in a securities filing about the resignation of its chief operating officer, Bruce Witherell. Freddie said that Witherell resigned "for personal reasons." His departure was effective immediately and he received no termination benefits. He had been receiving several millions of dollars in annual...

The Jerusalem Post columnist Shmuel Rosner has written a revealing column: "Why Israel Hates the Egyptian Uprising." His conclusion: "when Israel looks at the revolutionary forces in Egypt, it doesn't see "change," or "hope," or "democracy," or the "end of oppression." It doesn't see Egyptians rejoicing in anticipation...

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957 during President Eisenhower's administration. President Kennedy launched the American response that led to the Apollo program and the "Space Race." President Obama used these three space-related terms as metaphors forming the centerpiece of his State of the Union address:

This is...

Greetings from the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) annual enforcement conference in Charleston, S.C. I'm giving the keynote address Monday. I'll discuss the NASAA members' exceptionally important and often effective role against securities fraud in future columns. This column, however, deals with "safety and soundness" banking regulation.

Our...

President Obama's Executive Order on regulatory review was originally set in motion by his February 3, 2009 direction to OMB to create an improved regulatory review process.

The fundamental principles and structures governing contemporary regulatory review were set out in Executive Order 12866 of September 30, 1993. A great deal...

I get President Obama's "regulatory review" plan, I really do. His game plan is a straight steal from President Clinton's strategy after the Republican's 1994 congressional triumph. Clinton's strategy was to steal the Republican Party's play book. I know that Clinton's strategy was considered brilliant politics (particularly by the Clintonites),...

The new mantra of the Republican Party is the old mantra -- regulation is a "job killer." It is certainly possible to have regulations kill jobs, and when I was a financial regulator I was a leader in cutting away many dumb requirements. But we have just experienced the epic...

The Republican leadership successfully used the bluff made famous in the movie Blazing Saddles to get President Obama to support a massive tax cut for the wealthiest two percent of taxpayers.

In the movie, Sheriff Bart (played by Cleavon Little) responds to a mob that is about to lynch...

A number of analyses of the U.S. and global crisis begin by attempting to explain what they assume to be a paradox -- how could so small a market segment (subprime housing and CDOs backed by subprime) have caused (1) the largest financial bubble in history, (2) a U.S. economic...

The role of the criminal justice system with regard to financial fraud by elite bankers in 2011 is likely to reprise its role last decade -- de facto decriminalization. The Galleon investigation of insider trading at hedge funds will take much of the FBI's and the Department of...

Marty Robins' December 15, 2010, column "Blow the Whistle on Pointless Whistleblowing" in The Huffington Post opposed the SEC implementing the Dodd-Franks Act's provision that the SEC should develop a system of financial incentives for whistleblowers. Mr. Robins is a former corporate counsel with strongly conservative, anti-regulatory views....

I wrote recently about the Bank of England sowing the seeds of their next banking crisis by deciding to reduce bank examinations. Spencer Bachus (R. Ala.), the incoming Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, told the Birmingham News: "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be...

You know the administration is desperate when it creates a web page citing economists who support its capitulation on taxes.

The web page cites the support of five economists. Peter Cardillo, the Bank of America, Greg Mankiw, and Wells Fargo (are the second through fifth economists on...

President Obama has adopted Republican tax policies he knows to be disastrous for the nation. Obama never learned, or forgot, one of the essential lessons of junior high school -- how to deal with bullies. (This is proof positive that he is a native-born American -- he never would have...

I'm writing from the scene of the first Kilkenomics Festival, which brings together finance experts and professional comics to try to answer the public's questions about why the world is suffering recurrent, intensifying financial crises, why Ireland has gone to the heights and crashed spectacularly, and what options does it...

This is the second installment in a two-part response to subprime lending architect Andrew Kahr's American Banker column entitled "Spread the Word: Lying to Banks is Illegal." Read Part 1 here.

Why would the fraudulent nonprime lenders and brokers rely on financially unsophisticated borrowers to not...