If you need a scapegoat for your financial ponzi scheme, there's a guy on Craigslist who's looking for a job: Is your hedge fund in dire financial straits? Are you totally screwed and now realizing that someone has to take the fall? Has your ponzi scheme enveloped numerous celebrity-endorsed chariti...

If you have any lines of credit and you use them to manage your financial flow, you should evaluate your personal money matrix so you're ready in case all of them get cut. They're cutting lines of credit even for rocket scientists like reader Rocky. That's right, he's an engineer in the aerospace in...

The consumer confidence index plunged to 25 in Feb., down from 37.4 in Jan. Many economists only predicted it would fall to 35. The index is based on a monthly survey of 5,000 households, responding "positive", "negative" or "neutral" to five questions about how they feel about certain economic cond...

Regarding the $35,000 "commode on legs" ex-Merrill-Lynch CEO John Thain bought for his office, commenter VikramJaffe informs me that it is not as I theorized, a claw-footed toilet, but rather a chest of drawers on legs introduced by the French in the early 18th century. Too bad no one informed me of...

Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain spent over $1.22 million to renovate his office in early 2008, just as his firm was getting ready to slash thousands of jobs, cut back on spending and dump businesses. Here's this douchebag's big-ticket tally of personal aggrandizement in the midst of financial crisis: $...

The AP says that while last-minute shoppers are still out there looking for bargains — the holiday season was over long ago for retailers. Deep discounts are coming, as a flood of inventory sits unwanted on store shelves. Retailers' woes were good news for the dwindling numbers of shoppers who...

Oil prices have fallen below $40 a barrel, a 4 year low, despite OPEC announcing that it would cut production by 2.2 million barrels a day. Thursday afternoon saw crude oil trading below $36 a barrel, says Bloomberg. JP Morgan chase is warning that the possibility of $25 barrels of oil in the future...

Instead of canceling bonuses for top execs this year, Credit Suisse instead will pay them with the very toxic debt that's thrown the world into an economic crisis. Yes, Virginia, there is a Revenge Claus. The leveraged debt and mortgage-backed securities will be placed in a Partner Asset Facility an...

The fall of AIG is old news, but we had to laugh at this ad from the October issue of Money magazine sent in by reader Tom. I saw this AIG ad on the back of the October issue of Money magazine but I forgot about it until your Top Ten Corporate Blunders article mentioned AIG again. Since it was on th...

Leverage leverage leverage. Everyone's talking about it, but what does it mean? Basically it's a fancy word for debt, and companies can use that money to go buy more stuff. But if the stuff you bought is a bunch of risky messed-up investments like crap mortgaged-backed securities then you've got a p...