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Last year, ABAA dealer Patterson Smith of Montclair, NJ, who specializes in rare books on the law, crime & criminal justice, history and gambling, sold a collection of 2,200 books, manuscripts and pamphlets about financial sharpies, charlatans, and their schemes to defraud to John Jay College of Criminal Justice. As the New York Times reported, "The works -- including titles like Frauds Exposed by Anthony Comstock, an 1880s anti-vice crusader; 'Yellow Kid' Weil, the biography of a legendary Chicago swindler; Famous Imposters by Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula; and The Rise of Mr. Ponzi, the swindler's curious self-published, and self-serving, 1935 autobiography -- were purchased for $22,000."
Now catalogued in its entirety, within the collection was an unpublished manuscript by William H. McMasters, a memoir of his experiences working as a publicist for Charles Ponzi, the fraudster extraordinaire whose claim to Most Notorious Con Artist in History was recently ceded to Bernard L. Madoff in a no-contest episode of Our Gifted Grifters, a too-much-reality TV show pilot not picked up by the networks due to the recent glut of such characters; they threatened to outnumber the viewing audience..
* Financial District: Sellers lowered prices on almost a third of condo or co-op listings by an average of 11 percent in the Financial District.
* Tribeca: 24 percent of advertised apartments were discounted by an average of 11 percent.
* Soho: Sellers in SoHo lowered 27 percent of listings by an average of almost 11 percent in the first quarter.
Our hosts in Chicago screened Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room while we were visiting. What struck me about the documentary, which did a good job of capturing the psychopathic leadership and corporate culture of Enron--is that far from being a "wake-up call," Enron seems to have served instead as a model for what followed in American capitalism. Watching Enron's executives, listening to their voices on tape, I could only think of AIG, Halliburton-KBR, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Moody's, Madoff, General Motors and the long list of corporate scandals involving bribery, fraud, bonuses, skimming, and corruption of various kinds that festoon our newspapers
Market likely to peak the end of the week Just as the clock is winding down on my tenure at Merrill Lynch, the equity market is winding up with an impressive near-40% rally in just nine weeks. For those that were still long the equity market back at the March 9 lows, a good ‘devil’s advocate’ exercise would be to ask yourself the question whether you would have taken the opportunity, if the offer had been presented, to have sold out your position with a 40% premium at the time. What do you think you would have said back then, as fears of financial Armageddon were setting in? We haven’t conducted a poll, but we are sure at least 90% of the longs at that point would have screamed “hit the bid!” Are we at risk of missing the turn? Fast forward to today, and within two months optimism seems to have yet again replaced fear. Are we at risk of missing the turn? What if this is the real deal — a new bull market? This is the question that economists, strategists and market analysts must answer.
My favorite Warren Buffett saying is, "you don't know who's been swimming naked until the tide goes out." Well, the Wall Street tide has gone out, and it appears that lots of people were swimming naked in the pension business.
A new publication, "New Prosperity, the New Bull Market Magazine" celebrates the recovery of the U.S. economy and the return of the 26-year Bull market after an annoying 7-month long recession and Bear market.
I'm sure you applaud the full restoration of "prosperity" to this fair land after a brutal four hours of national soul-searching and dispensation of justice. Meanwhile, back in reality ...
Coming in May
The kerfuffle about current New York Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Stephen Friedman's purchase of some Goldman stock while the Fed was involved in reviewing major decisions about Goldman's future—well-covered by the Wall Street Journal here and here—raises a fundamental question about Wall Street's corruption. Just as the millions in AIG bonuses obscured the much more significant issue of the $70 billion-plus in conduit payments authorized by the N.Y. Fed to AIG's counterparties, the small issue of Friedman's stock purchase raises very serious issues about the competence and composition of the Federal Reserve of New York, which is the most powerful financial institution most Americans know nothing about.
As Franklin Roosevelt understood, Americans will postpone immediate gratification and endure hard sacrifices--if they must--so long as they are convinced the future can be better than the past. But we face a far more difficult problem at our moment in history. What do you promise people who have been told they can have anything they want, who are repeatedly congratulated for living in the best of all possible circumstances? How do you tell them "the good times," as we have known them, are not coming back? Americans need a new vision that helps them deal with reality, a promising story of the future that helps them let go of the past.
If you have any info that would help, please contact me at my private email address: bailout@michaelmoore.com
