Just how did mortgage-backed investments that were rated AAA by the ratings agencies Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch, wind up as “toxic assets” that precipitated a financial crisis that nearly brought down the world economic system last year and fed straight into this vicious recession? After all, investors depend on the agencies to assess [...]

Some guest poems from the Wall Street Poet’s web site, including No Investor or a Broker Be by Karl Neice No investor or a broker be In times when future nigh As postwar doldrums see Us through 2025 Cash is king, long live its value Its liquidity, and interest free When deflation signs can tell [...]

Michael Silverstein is a financial writer and former senior editor for Bloomberg. But more recently, he’s known as The Wall Street Poet, writing market commentary in the form of satiricial verse. A regular contributor to Minnesota Public Radio, he also has his own web site, WallStreetPoet.com, featuring a substantial archive. Those in the know about [...]

From The Awl: What a Blowout Year! Wall Street Rocking Without All Those Pesky Former Employees. Profits and net revenues are back up for Wall Street firms. Can bonuses be far behind?

Nate Silver of the political polling site FiveThirtyEight suggests the performance of health insurance stocks might be one way to neutrally evaluate the chance of health care reform’s success: It’s a bit hard to assess where we are in the health care debate. On the one hand, the (House) Democrats pushed through and passed a [...]

Quick note related to yesterday’s post about financial savant Norel Roubini’s latest jeremiad on the coming economic poopstorm: Someone at Gawker’s tired of all the negativity, evidenced in this post: Professor Norel Roubini’s Timeline of Terror.

Whether we’re experiencing another stock bubble now is a matter of opinion. But this post from The Consumerist pointing to the front page of the Wall Street Journal the first time the Dow broke 10,000–in 1999–is a good reminder of the kind of cheering-section sentiment tossed around in the middle of such an asset-inflated period. [...]

Yesterday we reported on well-regarded assets manager Jeremy Grantham’s prediction that the stock market is cruising for a 15-20% correction sometime this winter. In a section titled “The Last Hurrah and Markets Being Silly Again,” he makes the comparison between the current rally and the 46% gain in the S&P 500 between November and April [...]

From London, a lottery sign next to a newspaper headline. Entitled “A Tale of Two Lottos”.

So far today, the major market indices are up on the heels of the government’s GDP report, which showed a 3.5% growth rate in the 3rd quarter–the strongest GDP increase in two years. Just two more days of non-catastrophe on Wall Street, and we’ll have avoided any unwelcome October Surprise. But one closely watched market [...]