The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood...

Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you’ll buy products that they’re advertising.

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.

America is no longer a country that cares about experts. In fact, it hates experts. If you can’t fit a story into the culture-war storyline in ten seconds or less, it dies.

If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the...

By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short-sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron...

When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the...

An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.

The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast...

If the law doesn’t apply equally to everybody, then you don’t really have a system of law.

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon liars in Washington.

Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic.

After eighteen long months covering this dreary business, the whole campaign appears in my mind’s eye as one long, protracted scratch-fight over Internet-fueled nonsense.

In the ’50s and ’60s, journalism wasn’t a profession. It wasn’t something you went to college for – it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working...

Comparing your family budget to the sovereign debt of the United States is a little like comparing two kindergartners tossing a paper airplane to the Apollo 11 mission.

You might think otherwise, but it doesn’t naturally follow that because a law has been passed by Congress and signed by the president, said law actually has to be implemented.