Like a junkie that has to get a fix to maintain the same high, the U.S. Government deficit spending addiction has expanded for the last 30 years at approximately the same 10% compounded annual rate of the growth during the tumultuous three decades that included the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War.

Last weekend I attended the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting in Omaha, which has become a Mecca for investors, packed with 25,000 shareholders from all over the world. I had never seen anything like it, in all my years in finance.

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank at the center of Capitol Hill’s wrath, makes most of its money trading and not really representing customers, Lawrence G. McDonald, managing director of Pangea Capital Management said on CNBC Wednesday, and that’s where the firm’s ethics is being questioned.

By Lawrence G. McDonald
We are on a collision course with a meteor and it’s not from outer space.
Almost 10 years after 9/11 and the Enron off-balance sheet accounting
scandal, what have we learned? The answer is …

Discussing whether the methods banks use to disguise debt is unethical or not, with Ron Geffner, former SEC enforcement attorney/Sadis & Goldberg and Lawrence McDonald, A Colosssal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers author.

By JACQUELINE DOHERTY Barron’s
IT IS HARD TO HIDE AN ELEPHANT, BUT WHEN it comes to the over-the-counter derivatives market, Wall Street has done it for years. The financial crisis — greatly exacerbated by defaults on …

In a simple, easy-to-read way, Patrick Robinson and I describe the concept on page 161 of our book, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers. We wrote the book to bring people on Main Street inside Wall Street, not to confuse the living daylights out of people.