The Bay Street Sage

Former AIG (AIG) chief Hank Greenberg sues AIG, saying "material misrepresentations and omissions" caused him to buy more shares at an "artificially inflated price" and to pay extra taxes. Greenberg says the sale of AIG's insurance units to repay the government was "a tragedy."

Well, there is an old saying. Bears make money, bulls make money and pigs get slaughtered. Well this pig got slaughtered. The nerve of the guy! Does he honestly want us to believe that these guys just showed up and drove the car into the lake? AIG has been trading over the counter derivatives since the 1980s. Earlier this decade they got involved in residential mortgage insurance. On and on... The only difference is that Mr. Greenberg missed the music stopping. Perhaps he should be commenting on how his gang have almost brought down the US financial system? Can someone send him a tin cup?

Cramer's All-Time Favorite Stock Hits All-Time Low

Well, there is entertainment and investing. Seldom do the two go together. If Mr. Kramer was involved in running a hedge fund......... Unfortunately, the market has trashed good and bad stories indiscriminately. The problem is that all of these "seasoned" investors have refused to get involved in providing any fixed income investment ideas as far back as I can remember. That's where the action has been. But i suppose that doesn't help your TV ratings. And after all, it's about ratings and not investment performance.

Why Not to Buy Bond ETFs

This comment sounds like it's been written by an investment adviser. It seems to me that the issue of whether the market will go up or down is irrelevant. It wasn't so long ago that investors were told by their stock brokers to only invest money in the market that they could afford to lose. Please explain to me what's changed in the last twenty years. Sure, you'll be o.k. in twenty years. But the odds are that I'll be dead by then so that really doesn't do me any good. The strategy has become more important than the objective. The objective was always to preserve capital and make money or to make money and preserve capital. But it became all about the strategy and not the objective and the managers making money and not their clients. This same line of reasoning put forward here was everywhere when the down was 10,000, 9,000, 8,000, 7000...... I guess sooner or later you'll be right. But tell me in that crystal ball of yours when the Dow will be at 14,000 again and are you prepared to guarantee that? Surely, if you are that confident, perhaps you would underwrite the risk? Let me know.....

Why Not to Buy Bond ETFs

This comment sounds like it's been written by an investment adviser. It seems to me that the issue of whether the market will go up or down is irrelevant. It wasn't so long ago that investors were told by their stock brokers to only invest money in the market that they could afford to lose. Please explain to me what's changed in the last twenty years. Sure, you'll be o.k. in twenty years. But the odds are that I'll be dead by then so that really doesn't do me any good. The strategy has become more important than the objective. The objective was always to preserve capital and make money or to make money and preserve capital. But it became all about the strategy and not the objective and the managers making money and not their clients. This same line of reasoning put forward here was everywhere when the down was 10,000, 9,000, 8,000, 7000...... I guess sooner or later you'll be right. But tell me in that crystal ball of yours when the Dow will be at 14,000 again and are you prepared to guarantee that? Surely, if you are that confident, perhaps you would underwrite the risk? Let me know.....

To Create Jobs Quickly, Capitalize Small Business Lenders

Given that the writer is involved in the financial services sectors I am surprised at some of the comments. In my opinion, the solution is not to hand more capital over to the government bureaucrats to administer more programs. The financial system is already a casualty of lax regulation and inability to rein in the excesses of Wall Street since the deregulation of the financial services sector in the 1980s. We reap as we sow. A very senior credit officer from a major financial institution once told me that the credit process is a simple one. You need to answer three questions. First, how much money do you want, second what are you going to do with it and lastly how are you are going to pay it back. In the current environment borrowers have a difficult time answering the third question. Why is this so complicated that we must overlay more policies over more policies over more programs? If the government wishes to be a facilitator, it simply needs to help answer the question "how are you going to pay back the loan?" Am I missing something here? Let the government provide that assurance to lenders to get the ball rolling while reforming the regulatory framework under which the banks operate. We seem to have forgotten,however, that the banks first responsibility is to their depositors, not senior management. Let the government prosecute those senior executives that have taken out billions of dollars in bonuses on the basis of breach of fiduciary responsibility. Let's get back to basics and go from there.