Sublime

Sears filed for bankruptcy six months later. For more than a decade, the venerable department store had been controlled by a hedge fund manager named Eddie Lampert. The former Goldman Sachs trader merged Sears with another retailer, Kmart, sold off its real estate, reduced costs and spent billions on buybacks. After taking over as chief executive,

Securitization had produced the most toxic financial assets in the world – Fabrice Tourre was just one of an army of financial engineers manufacturing them – and had spread them far beyond the originating banks; revealingly, the near-total collapse of securitization in the course of 2008 was a key feature of the crisis.

Vanguard Intermediate-Term Treasury Index ETF (VGIT)/Schwab Intermediate-Term U.S. Treasury (SCHR) Indexed to: The Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Treasury 3–10 Year Index, an index tracking the intermediate-term sector of the U.S. Treasury market Expense ratio: 0.05 percent Current yield: 0.9 percent Average duration: 5.4 years Russell’s review: Expect

Yet Bagehot’s stringent conditions were not followed. Modern lenders of last resort have only a tenuous connection with their Victorian antecedents. They do not lend at high interest but at the lowest rates. Their emergency loans are not provided for a short period, but for years on end. They do not lend against high-quality collateral but reach to

While the firm did employ a well-regarded chief risk officer, Madelyn Antoncic, who had a PhD in economics and had worked at Goldman Sachs, her input was virtually nil. She was often asked to leave the room when issues concerning risk came up at executive committee meetings, and in late 2007, she was removed from the committee altogether.

‘John Bull’, says someone, ‘can stand a great deal, but he cannot stand two per cent …’ Here the moral obligation arises. People won’t take 2 per cent; they won’t bear a loss of income. Instead of that dreadful event, they invest their careful savings in something impossible – a canal to Kamchatka, a railway to Watchet, a plan for animating the

I always keep some stalwarts in my portfolio because they offer pretty good protection during recessions and hard times.