This New Blog

You know, I've been blogging for such a long time elsewhere, and moved over here so seamlessly, that it never occurred to me to post a note saying "hello," or something to that effect.

So... hello.

I'm a contributing editor at Portfolio, and my articles for the paper-and-ink edition have covered all the big mega-issues, which I'll also be writing about in this blog. I also will be examining the issues I covered in my 2006 book Wall Street Versus America. If you don't have a copy (and I'd wager most of you don't), then I'd strongly recommend you get it, as my books are an appreciating asset. Seriously. My first book Born to Steal is out of print, and the used paperback copies are selling on Amazon for $29.94 and up! Well, there is always the library I guess.

I've always liked to have fun with my blogging--I used to call my Blogspot blog "my little hobby bloggie"--and I hope to have fun with this one too. My tone is not always the most respectful. I apologize for that in advance. Hey, I've gotten a lot of complaints, but I keep getting worse.

I tend to blog about what interests me, which is sometimes what everybody else is writing about (Bernie Madoff, for instance), and sometimes are things that I feel are not getting sufficient attention, such as issuer retaliation and the hysteria over short selling and "naked" short selling.

My most recent posts have been moved here, and the rest are peacefully slumbering over at Blogspot.

I spend a great deal of time examining a Corporate Somalia called Overstock.com, which is a kind of petri dish encapsulating many of the themes that interest me, which include the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission to do its job. The SEC's failures have actually been a theme in many of the articles I've written over the years, starting with my very earliest articles for Business Week in the mid-1980s.

In a way, this blog is a throwback to my very first job, which was writing about a small town in Connecticut for a now-vanished bureau of The Hartford Courant. Global finance may be immense, but the same themes always seem to recur, with greed and incompetence at the top of the list. I used to write a great deal about sewers when I was in Connecticut, and I guess nothing much has changed--except for the names of the rats.