Posts by: Dick Taffe

Morgan Stanley new Fed target

Wall Street investment bank Morgan Stanley reportedly is being investigated by federal authorities to see if it misled investors about mortage-derivatives deals it helped design and sometimes bet against.  This is on the heels of the Securities and Exchange Commission charging Goldman Sachs with securities fraud involving similar collateralized debt obligations or CDOs.  Law Professor […]

iPad rival from Verizon/Google

Verizon and Google are teaming to develop a tablet computer in their combined effort to catch up with Apple’s iPad and host AT&T.  School of Management Professor N. Venkat Venkatraman, head of the Information Systems Department, is researching competition in business network and says this is a new form of competition — not between firms […]

Cameron new British P.M.

Conservative Party leader David Cameron is the new British Prime Minister — at 43, the youngest in nearly 200 years.  Cameron took over after Labour Party leader Gordon Brown resigned, his party having been unable to form a coalition government with the smaller Liberal Democrat party after none of the three won a Parliamentary majority in last […]

FDIC floats bank-reform proposals

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is proposing that the top 40 U.S. banks — with assets totaling $8.3 trillion — submit “living wills” to show how they could be split off from parent companies and wound down.  In parallel with Congressional reform efforts, the FDIC also is proposing that those selling securitiezed assets retain 5% […]

SEC probes stock-market plunge

Heads of the major stock exchanges were summoned to Washington by federal regulators to try to help figure out what caused last week’s computerized sell-off the shot the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1,000 points in a matter of minutes.  Law Professor Elizabeth Nowicki, a former Securities and Exchange Commission attorney and Wall Street lawyer, […]

Kagan nominated to SCOTUS

U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, a former Harvard Law School dean, was nominated by President Obama to be the 112th justice of the Supreme Court.  BU Law Professor Jack Beermann, an authority on the high court who knows the nominee well, says he see it as a strong plus that Kagan is not a sitting […]

Brit elections stalemated

And the winner is … no one.  The most tightly contested British Parliamentary election in a generation has ended in the first stalemate since 1974, with no party winning an outright majority of seats that would enable it to choose a prime minister and form a ruling government.  Frantic efforts are being made to shape some […]

Greece’s debt crisis grows

As nationwide workers’ strikes continued and deadly riots erupted in Athens over austerity measures invoked to deal with Greece’s ongoing debt crisis, fears grew that the situation may adversely impact the global banking system.  Mark Williams, author of “Uncontrolled Risk” about the fall of Lehman Brothers who teaches finance in the School of Management, says the […]

Crisis panel probes bank “window dressing”

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which is looking into the causes for the 2008 economic crash, today questioned former executives from the investment bank Bear Stearns (sold to J.P. Morgan in a firesale after a run on the bank) and explored the open-secret of how Wall Street banks legally fudged their quarterly books to dress up […]

Times Square bomb suspect

Investigators are trying to determine any connections between a Pakistani-American charges in the failed Times Square car bombing and any international terrorist groups, possibly the Pakistani Taliban.  International relations Professor Adil Najam, director of the Pardee Center for the Student of the Longer-Range Future and editor of “Pakistanis in America: Portrait of a Giving Community,” […]