April 22, 2010 at 4:47 pm
President Obama returned to Manhattan to lay out his vision for Wall Street reform now inching its way through Congress. Former deputy Comptroller of the Currency Robert Bench, now a senior fellow at the BU Law School’s Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law, says the proposed reforms don’t go far enough at reining in […]
April 22, 2010 at 10:31 am
The United Nations secretary-general soon will name a new UN climate chief on the heels of the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen negotiations. International Relations Professor Adil Najam, director of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and lead author of the UN’s climate change panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Prize, […]
April 21, 2010 at 5:45 pm
History Professor Bruce Schulman, author of “Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism,” asks in a Politico commentary: Will the White House punish Democrats who defected on the monumental health care overhaul? After tracing both Franklin Roosevelt’s and LBJ’s successes and failures in dealing with their own political party, Schulman suggests that President Obama is learning […]
April 21, 2010 at 12:23 pm
On the heels of the SEC suing Goldman Sachs for fraud, key Senate Republicans are easing up on earlier harsh criticism of financial regulatory reform bills offered by the Democrats. Political science Professor Graham Wilson, author of “Only in America? American Politics in Comparative Perspective,” says the shift makes political sense. “The political costs of […]
April 20, 2010 at 5:43 pm
U.S. antitrust regulators from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have proposed new guidelines for how they scrutinize mergers for possible antitrust violations. Law Professor Keith Hylton, an antitrust law authority, and School of Management finance Professor Michael Salinger, a former FTC director, agree the proposed guidelines more accurately reflect current practice […]
April 20, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Lehman Brothers ex-CEO Richard Flud told Congress he has “no recollection” of hearing anything about how the now-bankrupt Wall Street investment bank used controversial accounting techniques to hide toxic assets from the balance sheet. Former Fed bank examiner Mark Williams, who teaches finance at the School of Management and just had a book published on the fall […]
April 20, 2010 at 12:28 pm
A new study produced by Boston University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism that outlines media coverage of the Massachusetts special senate election has revealed some interesting points about the recent race. According to the report, national media initially lost interest in a “fairly dull and utterly local contest.” But, “when it became […]
April 16, 2010 at 4:48 pm
A newly released document shows that, although he didn’t okay it in advance, then CIA Director Porter Goss in 2005 approved of the decision to destroy dozens of videotapes of brutal interrogations of terrorism detainees. International Relations Professor Joseph Wippl, a 30-year CIA operation officer, asks if the tapes were destroyed to protect CIA personnel doing […]
April 16, 2010 at 3:58 pm
You’d think that networks that are linked to other networks would be more stable because they’d multiply their redundancy. Wrong. New research by BU physicists, published in the latest Nature magazine and discussed in Wired, shows just the opposite. In fact, networked networks are more susceptible to swift, catastrophic collapse than are independent networks, said […]
April 16, 2010 at 1:59 pm
The SEC alleges Goldman Sachs defrauded investors by marketing an investment backed by sub-prime loans without telling them that a big hedge fund was on the other side betting that it would fail — which it did. Law Professors Cornelius Hurley, a former counsel to the Fed Board of Governors, and Elizabeth Nowicki, a former SEC […]
