With the announcement of the Oscar nominees, try watching Margin Call to combine movie watching and compliance. Margin Call received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. The movie sets Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, and Simon Baker as the key players at an investment firm during the earliest hours of the [...]
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Defending Jacob
Being a lawyer, I like a good legal thriller. If you’re looking for a legal thriller to keep you up at night, try William Landay’s latest novel: Defending Jacob. Jacob is a fourteen year old boy whose classmate is found murdered. Jacob’s father is an assistant district attorney. You can guess from the title that [...]
Why How We Do Anything Means Everything
An acquaintance in the compliance field sent me a copy of Dov Seidman’s How and I let it sit around for months. (My “To Read” stack has grown very tall.) I assumed How was vanity book and would rattle on and on about Seidman’s company: LRN. I recently moved and my “To Read” stack was tumbled [...]
Boomerang – Michael Lewis Looks at the New Third World
Michael Lewis packages his stories on the effects of the global financial crisis in Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany, and California into one book: Boomerang. If you had ready the stories when they were published in Vanity Fair, then you’ve ready the book. If you missed some (or all) of those stories then this book is [...]
Reckless Endangerment
So what caused the 2008 financial crisis? We know that the direct cause was the meltdown in the US housing market. I think we are still trying to put together the pieces and point the finger of blame. It was a big bubble and the explosive reaction when the bubble burst. It took many different [...]
No One Would Listen
You can’t really criticize Harry Markopolos. He was right. He had spotted something wrong with Bernie Madoff years before the biggest Ponzi scheme collapsed. Unlike many others, Markopolos contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission about his suspicions. They ignored him. Markopolos went to the press, but no meaningful article came of it. When Madoff’s scheme [...]
Compliance and Liar’s Poker
Michael Lewis has written some great stuff on our most recent financial crisis: The Big Short, Iceland’s Meltdown, Greece and Corruption, and Popping the Irish Bubble. This was not his first rodeo. Lewis had a brief career in finance working as a London-based bond salesman for Solomon Brothers during the mid eighties. His finance career [...]
Lords of Finance
The financial crisis of 2008 was not the first. In reading Lords of Finance you see some of the obvious parallels from the 1920s. Liaquat Ahamed focuses his story on Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve, Hjalmar Schact of the Reichsbank and Emile Moreau of the [...]
What Caused the 2008 Crisis?: All the Devils are Here
Was it Fannie Mae? Was it the lack of regulatory oversight? Was it the rating agencies? Was it pure greed? Yes, yes, yes and yes. Plus, there were lots of other factors. Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera put together an insightful look at the many factors that created the housing bubble and amplified the destruction [...]
Attacking Wall Street in 1920
I don’t often include fiction books in my book reviews on this site. But I was drawn to The Death Instinct because its historic fiction is centered around an event on Wall Street. So I thought the book would be interesting for a compliance professional. A horse-drawn wagon passed through Wall Street’s lunchtime crowds on [...]
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