There is an article, and I use that term loosely, in the current issue of Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs. It’s certainly not a publication I normally read, in fact I think this may be the first copy I have ever owned, but the the Goldman 
piece has gotten a little buzz going and one of my commenters told me to read it. (The full thing is not available on-line in authorized form. Google and you can find bootlegs. Legal excerpts here.)
Admittedly, I expected little from an issue whose cover story was "Boys to Men: Inside the World of the Jonas Brothers." But Matt Taibbi’s Goldman diatribe, "The Bailout: How Goldman Sachs Runs Washington" is truly nauseatingly horrible.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it is everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
Read more »
I realize that today is a holiday for many of you, but I just couldn’t put off the monthly round-up of tips from the frugalosphere for another week. I know than this means that most of you will not get this until Monday, when you 
return to the office (internet at home is not frugal) but that’s better than waiting until the end of the week, isn’t it?
June was an exciting month as old themes faded into memory and new ones emerged. There was nothing in June worth reporting on toilet paper and toilet paper tubes, nor on laundry detergent.
What was big this month was food. Frugal Upstate shared a recipe for Iced Coffee. (Can you imagine the CEO of Starbucks when he heard the formula got out!) Other tips included freezing the unused whites of eggs in ice cube trays if your recipe calls for only yolks and cutting the sugar called for in cookie recipes in half. They will taste just as good Thrifty Jinxy tells us.
Read more »
Yesterday, being the last Tuesday of June, was, obviously, the day they released the April Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller Home Price Index numbers. If you are a regular reader of this blog you know I think this is just about the only useful data we get on the housing market. And house prices aren’t just
important to us consumer-homeowners, they are central to the whole Great Recession thing.
Judging by Tuesday afternoon headlines, the data wasn’t so good. "U.S. Home Price Declines Moderating, Index Says" leads the story in The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal has "Home Prices Drop at Slower Pace", Bloomberg tells us "Home-Price Slide Eases" and the Boston Globe carries a story with the headline "Home prices post 18.1 percent annual drop in April".
Read more »
I had it all figured out. Last week’s review/roundup of the Carnival of Personal Finance went well, so I thought I’d do it again this week. I planned to spend yesterday leisurely reading through the posts and writing it up in time to get it posted nice and early today.
Not so much. The carnival only appeared this morning, leaving me just a few hours to run through it. Yes, I could have come up with another post idea yesterday, but, you see, I had a plan.
This week’s carnival is hosted by Green Panda Treehouse. Is that blog name a cultural reference that everybody who is younger than I am gets? There is a picture of a green panda on the banner, which helps me. I thought it was the tree house that was green.
There are five editor’s picks, two of which are on finance related marital problems and two of which discuss how expensive it is to own a house. Something on your mind Green Panda?
Read more »
It would never occur to me to give out some bits of advice if somebody else hadn’t first suggested an unwise alternative. Some things seem just so obvious and uncontroversial that writing them up would be pointless. Then I read something that reminds me this is the personal finance world I am talking about.
Case in point is rolling your old 401k over into an IRA when you leave your job. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money, this is not the no-brainer I foolishly assumed. It is a conundrum. Who knew?
In case you are not up to speed on the deal with 401ks once you stop working where the 401k lives, you basically have four choices. You can cash out the money in the form of a distribution, on which you will pay income taxes and, assuming you are under 59 1/2, an additional 10% penalty. That’s probably not a good idea unless you seriously needed the cash. (For example if you just lost your job.)
Read more »
piece has gotten a little buzz going and one of my commenters told me to read it. (The full thing is not available on-line in authorized form. Google and you can find bootlegs. Legal excerpts here.)
Government, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
July 6, 2009 9:00 am | 
Comments (24) 
Subscribe