One of the few people who has been sounding the alarm for years about the state of the financial sector is John Mauldin, author of the very interesting book Bulls-Eye Investing. He has a mailing list where he prints interesting articles he encounters about finance, economics or geopolitics. Two days ago was an article by Michael Lewitt about the fall of Lehman Brothers. He outlines a few practical steps to shore up regulations going forward:
There may be some controversy about some of these items, but making off-balance sheet entities illegal and the uptick rule sound like no-brainers. I'd go a little farther and put the kabosh on Mark to Model accounting completely. It makes it too easy for a company to cook their books by using one 'model' for their assets and another for their 'liabilities'. Think it doesn't happen?
A few weeks ago, the Washington Post published an infographic detailing Obama vs. McCain's tax plans. Viveka Weiley shows how some modifications to the design of the graph conveys a lot more information, and makes a much stronger statement.
I think a nice ad campaign would consist of this image on the screen with a brief voice-over showing how the tax policies are different. How many people would really pay more in taxes? Who gets more relief in which plan?
