[Photo: Brokers With Hands On Their Faces Blog] The fine folks over at NPR’s This American Life just won a Peabody Award for “The Giant Pool of Money,” an impressive, easy-to-follow report explaining how the subprime mortgage crisis came to be. They’ve also put out similarly excellent episodes covering the crises in banking and credit markets. [...]

[Photo: Financial Post] Every crisis needs a pithy slogan or defining epigram, as Kat referenced in the previous post about the revival of “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters from WWII Britain. Thankfully, we may have one already for the global mess we now find ourselves in, courtesy of Latvia’s finance minister. From The Economist: Amid the wreckage [...]

The word ‘kleptocracy’ has been historically applied to a substrata of not-quite-failed states (Nigeria today, Indonesia under Suharto, Fujimori’s Peru) where rulers and elites have enriched themselves at the expense of raising people’s living standards. As more of the backstory around the current financial crisis comes to light, the United States is coming dubiously close [...]

It took long enough. I was wondering when the Canadian media would finally cast its glance back ten years ago, to a time when our banks were pleading not penury but that they were too petite to compete with American and global rivals. It was merger mania: Royal Bank coupling with Bank of Montreal, TD [...]