Boeing (NYSE:BA) and the airlines are currently in negotiations with the Trump administration for a bailout, with taxpayers expected to replace capital that those companies had previously eliminated through stock buybacks. If they get money without being forced through bankruptcy, this will become a pattern in each business cycle because it is so beneficial to […]

At the end of the 1983 movie “Trading Places,” the Duke brothers’ solid, long-established commodities business has been bankrupted in the orange juice pits by the insider-trading young sleazebags Winthorpe and Valentine, and the Dukes realize to their horror that trading has closed and the screens are dead. “Turn them back on” they cry feebly […]

Maynard Keynes, as a good left-liberal, was a political admirer of an earlier Cambridge alumnus Oliver Cromwell, and certainly regarded himself as part of the “Roundhead” tradition. Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that, just as Cromwell’s virtues and policies pointed Britain on the road to the Industrial Revolution, so the vices and profligacies inspired […]

Jack Welch, former GE Chairman (1981-2000) who died last week, was named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine in 1999. Twenty years later, we can see clearly that the Manager of the 20th century was not Welch but Alfred P. Sloan, CEO and then Chairman of General Motors (1920-1963). Welch’s main achievement was destroying […]

President Donald Trump last week pardoned Mike Milken, the effective originator of the junk bond market, who had been sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1990 for mysterious securities infractions. While I have considerable sympathy for Milken himself (not that he needs it, being worth $3.8 billion) I thought it worth performing the thought-experiment: […]