The view from the financial ledge

October 4, 2008

Yesterday's bailout approval is not the end of the financial crisis. Rather, it halts the free-fall, if only temporarily. It furnishes a narrow ledge to perch on, assess broken bones and contemplate the abyss.

Recent columns

• The view from the financial ledge

  October 4, 2008

  Yesterday's bailout approval is not the end of the financial crisis. Rather, it halts the free-fall, if only temporarily. It furnishes a narrow ledge to perch on, assess broken bones and contemplate the abyss.

• Stocks rise and fall, but the fundamentals stay the same

  October 1, 2008

  When everything seems upside down, when century-old banks fall like duckpins, when Democratic congresspeople want to rescue Wall Street and Republicans don't, when even "safe" investments seem risky, there are still eternal truths investors can embrace.

• Bet on passage of a bailout, but more pain is on the way

  September 30, 2008

  Congress will pass a bailout package. The stock and credit markets are making sure of that.

• Give fixed heating costs the cold shoulder

  September 27, 2008

  The first thing you need to know about recent energy-market gyrations and winter heating costs is to say "no thanks" to BGE Home's fixed-price natural gas offer of $1.599 per therm.

• A new generation pays long-term cost of short-sightedness

  September 24, 2008

  SEPT. 24, 2028

• Taxpayers should get a big chunk of bailed-out companies

  September 23, 2008

  Now that American taxpayers are about to set up the biggest-ever vulture investment fund, let's make sure they get the same kind of action as Wall Street's traditional carrion fowl.

• Constellation brought the near-collapse on itself

  September 19, 2008

  Would Constellation Energy's near-collapse and emergency sale have been necessary if the General Assembly hadn't resisted and ultimately quashed its planned merger with Florida's FPL Group two years ago?

• In propping up Constellation, don't let BGE customers fall

  September 18, 2008

  No wonder Constellation Energy CEO Mayo Shattuck wanted to merge two years ago with FPL Group of Florida.

• AIG failure would bring pain to added millions of Americans

  September 17, 2008

  Henry Paulson could afford to apply tough love to Lehman Brothers, the investment company that entered bankruptcy proceedings this week. Lehman's collapse, the treasury secretary knew, would cause limited damage outside midtown Manhattan.

• Convenient mall walk-in clinics fill an unmet need

  September 13, 2008

  Pam Wahbe and her family have a primary-care physician. But lately they've been skipping the traditional doctor's office for minor ailments and instead using a walk-in clinic at a Towson CVS drugstore.

• Legg Mason manager's plan seems to be crash and bear it

  September 10, 2008

  Legg Mason's Bill Miller isn't getting any love for his stock-picking. But perhaps we should admire him for his titanium stomach, in the way people appreciate snake charmers or Evel Knievel.

• Let's skip biography and get to economy

  September 6, 2008

  No wonder both presidential candidates are promising change. Even the stupid don't need to be reminded that, yet again, it really is the economy that will dominate voters' concerns.

• What's behind shortfall in state's taxes? Try smuggling

  September 3, 2008

  State bean counters blame the crash in sales-tax collections on high gas prices and a weak economy.

• There's gold in those mountains of Garrett

  August 30, 2008

  Just as they did in the 1980s, human ingenuity and Mother Nature are working together to solve the energy crisis. There is an Appalachian energy boom from West Virginia to New York, exemplified by a group of farmers and other landowners who expect to lease nearly a tenth of Maryland's Garrett County next week to natural-gas prospectors for $36 million.

• A simple, honest version of the slots referendum

  August 27, 2008

  Supporters and opponents of Maryland slot machines are arguing over the wording of a slots-approval measure on November's ballot. The language goes on and on about education but says nothing about horse racing. Here's how an honest version would read:

• Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac identity crisis imperils taxpayers

  August 22, 2008

  Few chapters in the annals of corporate welfare are as impressive as the one on Fannie Mae, the troubled mortgage concern.

• Build the natural gas terminal, but not at Sparrows Point

  August 20, 2008

  Maryland undoubtedly needs more and cheaper energy, but we're not going to do just anything to get it. We won't strip state forests for fireplace fodder. We won't reverse pollution controls on cars and power plants.

• CEG's dose of tough love

  August 15, 2008

  A few sentences on page 46 of a financial disclosure that did not change reported profits, sales or net worth caused Constellation Energy Group's prospects to go into brownout this week.

• How long can Md. escape recession?

  August 13, 2008

  It might not feel like it, but so far the national recession of 2008 has left Maryland relatively unscathed. As tough as times are in housing, stores, publishing and finance, this state has avoided the blunt trauma visited upon many regions and the nation as a whole.

• Jury vindicates a homebuyer done wrong by her lender

  August 8, 2008

  Kimberly Thomas says she couldn't believe it when it came time to sign for the $505,000 house she had agreed to buy in Burtonsville.

• No rush to use dreaded 'R' word

  August 6, 2008

  With thousands of jobs disappearing each month and consumer spending declining, everybody knows we're in a recession. Everybody, that is, but the people whose task it is to officially say so.

• Spice maker provides a lesson

  July 30, 2008

  To understand the intense economic pressures sweeping the globe, you could earn a master's in business administration or convene a focus group of economists and Fortune 500 CEOs.

• More defense vendors, please

  July 25, 2008

  In 1993, Defense Secretary Les Aspin invited more than a dozen CEOs of big weapons and aerospace companies to dinner at the Pentagon. In what has become known as the Last Supper, he shocked them by saying that, with the end of the Cold War, America had too many defense contractors and that the companies needed to merge or die.

• Ferris missed a chance to act

  April 11, 2008

  David A. Dadante was making questionable stock trades almost immediately after Ferris Baker Watts took him on as a client in early 2003.

• Point's future is up to Annapolis

  March 26, 2008

  The global economy has done its part: Russia's OAO Severstal has agreed to buy the Sparrows Point steel mill and invest in badly needed upgrades.

• Primary voters have real choices

  February 8, 2008

  Critics of American politics - generally from the left - often say there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans.

• Soul-searching at Ferris

  September 12, 2007

  So Stifel Financial and a few other companies are interested in buying Ferris Baker Watts. No big news there. Ferris has been getting buyout feelers for years.

• Being free of Mittal is a good thing for the Point

  February 21, 2007

  Getting sold by Mittal Steel might be the best thing to happen to Sparrows Point in a long, long time.

• Ground rent law violates the principles of due process, fair play

  December 13, 2006

  Because Deloris McNeil missed paying a $96-a-year ground rent bill, she lost the Fayette Street house she had bought for $44,500 and lived in for years. The tiny, delinquent bill morphed into creditor-seizure powers that trumped fair play, common sense and fundamental rights.

• However it's spun, Baltimore is losing a headquarters

  December 20, 2005

  As sales of key corporate citizens to out-of-town landlords go, the merger of Constellation Energy with FPL Group isn't that bad. So why are they trying to spin us like a dynamo in a heat wave?

• U.S. probes grant to city nonprofit

  October 2, 2005

  The U.S. Education Department's inspector general is investigating whether a senior official of the agency improperly helped the National Federation of the Blind win a key federal grant around the time she was discussing taking a job at the Baltimore-based nonprofit.

• Big rise in Md. tax revenue is partly credited to home sales

  July 31, 2005

  WHAT'S BEHIND the surprising spurt in Maryland tax collections and what Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. calculates is a billion-dollar budget surplus?

• Reform goes back to start on nonprofit boondoggle

  July 20, 2005

  FAITHFUL READERS know about a $2 billion federal boondoggle called the Javits-Wagner- O'Day program, which pays peanuts to disabled people working on no-bid government contracts, enriches nonprofit executives and operates with little oversight or control.

• A warning to charitable donors and a case for tougher disclosure laws on nonprofits

  June 19, 2005

  RIIIING. IT'S the National Federation of the Blind of Oregon, calling across that state. They want money "to help the blind of the area," according to a fund-raising script from 2003.

• Nonprofits seem in no big hurry to fix their problems

  March 2, 2005

  The nonprofit-industrial complex knows it has a problem.

• Chimes, other charities are object of badly needed reform

  December 5, 2004

  FEDERAL authorities have launched a tax probe of Baltimore-based Chimes Inc. and have proposed sweeping governance standards, including executive salary limits, for Chimes and other nonprofit groups that get $2 billion annually from taxpayers to employ the disabled.

• The lights start to flash at end of the blackout

  August 20, 2003

  IN ECONOMICS there's a heads for every tails, a pull for every push, and the happy reciprocal of the Blackout of 2003 will be the purchase of billions of dollars' worth of electrical transmission hardware.

• Citigroup gets a black eye in Rusnak caper

  May 28, 2003

  JUST WHEN you thought it was safe to walk down Wall Street again without two Dobermans to repel the white-collar muggers, Allied Irish Banks brings new allegations of misdeeds against Bank of America and Citigroup.

• Bailout pays airlines for years of bad management

  September 30, 2001

  AS HE pursued his doomed merger with United Airlines earlier this year, US Airways chief executive Rakesh Gangwal said "there is no Plan B" if regulators were to block the deal.