finance

"I believe in the power of the free market," Obama said in a speech at Cooper Union, not far from the New York Stock Exchange. "But a free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it."

http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/22/news/economy/Obama_Wall_Street_reform/in...

"We’ve known for some time that Goldman Sachs and other firms marketed mortgage-backed securities even as they sought to make profits by betting that such securities would plunge in value. This practice, however, while arguably reprehensible, wasn’t illegal. But now the S.E.C. is charging that Goldman created and marketed securities that were deliberately designed to fail, so that an important client could make money off that failure. That’s what I would call looting.

Long article (still reading it...), but good overview of what needs to be done... I especially like "Obama's fondness for policies based on empirical research" - for some reason I don't think that's a fondness Bush shared...

It's been great fun watching Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer go at it this week, and their one-on-one interview took the cake.  I was surprised how meek and sorry-looking Cramer was - it would have been a little more interesting if he put up more of a fight, but it was still fun :).  The full interview on comedy central's site is great, as is the full clip of Cramer on thestreet.com talking about the games people play.

http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2009/03/13/stewartcramer-whos-this-song-ab...