The AAI favors vigorous public and private enforcement.
Blawgletter just read a troubling item in Corporate Crime Reporter. The title — "Connor Says Antitrust Division Becoming Increasingly Irrelevant In Fight Against Cartels" — refers to an interview with an Economics professor, John Connor, of Purdue University. Dr. Connor last month finished a
The Old Stone Fort (1779) in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Starbucks yesterday released The List — of 600 stores it plans to close by early 2009. Blawgletter drank in the new information this morning. We perked up when we got to page 15, where the Texas listings started. Several Dallas outposts, we learned, will grind to an
They sure don’t look like price-fixers.
Say a company offers to negotiate fees for you and other members of your profession. You and many of your colleagues say fine, knock yourself out. The negotiator then asks each of its client-professionals to name her minimum price for performing specific services. It collects the pricing data and
Pocket-size bazooka?
If you’ve got a squirt gun in your pocket, you may have to take it out. If you’ve got a bazooka, and people know you’ve got it…you’re not likely to take it out.
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, July 15, 2008 (testifying before the Senate Banking Committee about government support of mortgage
The Federal Circuit today invalidated a patent that combined a way to obtain electronic bids from bond underwriters with web browser technology. Prior art allowed underwriters to submit online bids using proprietary software to a secure computer system. The patent holder tried to distinguish the old method by asserting that it didn’t contemplate allowing underwriters
A main enabler of mortgage lending excesses now needs you to front it some cash.
Blawgletter just read a NYT article about the feds’ plan for avoiding a bailout of mortgage lending giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The plan? To bail them out.
The government seems to think that obtaining authority to rescue these
The columnist and Homer Simpson at last agree on something.
No beer, no civilization.
George F. Will, "Survival of the Sudsiest", The Washington Post, July 10, 2008.
"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." B. Franklin.
Senator Carter Glass (1858-1946) disliked the New Deal but the banking excesses that preceded the Great Depression even more.
Blawgletter learned in law school about a pillar of the New Deal — the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Little did we know that, 66 years after Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law, Glass-Steagall would
As the credit crisis crests ever higher, the Seventh Circuit’s affirmance of summary judgment against a guarantor today strikes Blawgletter as a harbinger of decisions to come.
The ruling turned on whether a guarantor of a Uruguayan tiremaker’s debt presented evidence to support its defense that the lender "impaired" the collateral for the loan. Impairing
The Second Circuit today joined the Third, Sixth, and Seventh Circuits in holding that a "cash balance" pension plan doesn’t violate the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act of 1974 despite the fact that older employees (sort of) get less bang for their buck.
A cash balance plan creates a phantom account for each plan