The Strange Defense of Martin Shkreli

On Wednesday, June 28th, the criminal-defense attorney Benjamin Brafman stood in front of a Brooklyn jury and presented an unusual argument. In white-collar trials, which this was, defense lawyers often do their best to portray their clients—typically wealthy executives from companies or industries that may not be known for high ethical standards—as generous folk who go to church and coach children’s soccer leagues, gentle-hearted people who happen to drive Porsches. In this case, though, Brafman was representing Martin Shkreli, the notorious hedge-fund manager and drug-company entrepreneur, and such an argument wasn’t an option. Instead, Brafman tried to build a case around Shkreli’s greatest potential liability, one that Shkreli has highlighted live-streaming himself and in interviews—his behavior. “Is he strange? Yes,” Brafman said, of his client, during his opening argument. “Will you find him weird? Yes.” He said that Shkreli had been compared to “Rain Man” for his eccentricity, and finally added, “As Lady Gaga would say, he was born this way.”

The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill

MERRICK, N.Y. — Deirdre Yapalater’s recent colonoscopy at a surgical center near her home here on Long Island went smoothly: she was whisked from pre-op to an operating room where a gastroenterologist, assisted by an anesthesiologist and a nurse, performed the routine cancer screening procedure in less than an hour. The test, which found nothing worrisome, racked up what is likely her most expensive medical bill of the year: $6,385.

That is fairly typical: in Keene, N.H., Matt Meyer’s colonoscopy was billed at $7,563.56. Maggie Christ of Chappaqua, N.Y., received $9,142.84 in bills for the procedure. In Durham, N.C., the charges for Curtiss Devereux came to $19,438, which included a polyp removal. While their insurers negotiated down the price, the final tab for each test was more than $3,500.

China: The Orient Excess

Three decades of economic liberalisation have radically changed the face of China. With the number of Chinese billionaires increasing rapidly (it now has almost as many as the US and is closing in on the top spot), the communist ideals of the past seem to have faded beyond recognition.

"You can never have enough money. Money helps me fulfill my dreams", says Li Chao, for whom expensive hobbies like motor racing are no longer out of reach. He thinks nothing of splashing out hundreds of thousands of dollars on glamorous supercars and is unapologetic about his growing wealth. After all, he says, he has earned it.

Sequestration Is Austerity, but Not Enough for Simpson and Bowles

Sequestration?

Cue the return of Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, frontmen for American austerity.

If sequestration is not averted by the end of the month, America will experience an arbitrary austerity agenda that shifts burdens from the wealthy onto working families. It makes across-the-board cuts to vital services. As President Obama noted Tuesday, sequestration would impose “automatic brutal spending cuts” to job creation, infrastructure and education initiatives. It would, as well, slash funding for air traffic control, federal prosecutions and Federal Emergency Management Agency grants that make it possible for states and local governments to hire needed firefighter and emergency personnel.

Citigroup Investors Cheer Massive Layoffs, Hope For More

If you're one of the lucky 11,000 employees whose holidays just got ruined by Citigroup, here's some cold comfort: You'll have company soon enough.

Citigroup, once upon a time the biggest bank in the U.S., but shrinking steadily, on Wednesday announced it was laying off 11,000 workers around the world, or about 4 percent of its 260,000-human work force.

CEOs only have eyes for China

East is east and west is west, wrote Rudyard Kipling, and never the twain shall meet.

Clearly dear old Rudyard was never exposed to the Canadian business class hot on the scent of Chinese profits.

The twain appeared to meet with a vengeance at an Ottawa conference put on several days ago by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives on Canada in the Asian century. Clearly Canada’s CEOs never met a Chinese business opportunity they did not want to embrace. And yet these titans of our business world weren’t listening to what was being said at their own conference.

Big Bank CEO Pay Spiked An Average Of 12 Percent In 2011, Study Says

Here's some advice: Become a CEO.

The CEOs of 15 top U.S. and European banks got an average raise of 12 percent last year, pushing their average pay up to $12.8 million, according to research by Equilar, an executive compensation data firm. The Financial Times first asked Equilar for the information and published the results on Monday.

In a lot of ways, it's the same old post-recession story: CEO pay up, corporate profits hit all-time high, wages as a share of the economy reach record low.

From Mass Prosperity to Severe Recession in Fifty Years

The financial crisis of 2008 produced a rash of books on Wall Street covering these events from the point of view of all the major investment banks, politicians, mortgage dealers and everyone else within arm’s reach. Judging from most of them, though, you might think the problems in our financial sector go back only a decade and originated in the schemes of Wall Street’s financial geniuses to repackage bad mortgages into super-safe assets.

The story is now a familiar one: speculation in mortgage-backed securities added steam to a runaway housing bubble. When the house of cards eventually collapsed, it required a taxpayer bailout to save Wall Street while the subsequent bad debt lead to the most severe recession since the Great Depression.

Even the most ambitious books generated by the meltdown go back only fifteen years or so and discuss such things as the bailout of the hedge fund ironically titled Long-Term Capital Management; the removal of the last piece of New Deal banking regulation, Glass-Steagall; Goldman Sachs going public; and the isolation of the few regulators, such as Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, who sounded the alarm about the rapidly expanding derivatives market.