Some of the deals Siegel made were hugely profitable, while others proved more troublesome. As he soon discovered, after creditors sell off unpaid debts, those debts enter a financial netherworld where strange things can happen. A gamut of players — including debt buyers, collectors, brokers, street hustlers and criminals — all work together, and against one another, to recoup every penny on every dollar. In this often-lawless marketplace, large portfolios of debt — usually in the form of spreadsheets holding debtors’ names, contact information and balances — are bought, sold and sometimes simply stolen.
Category: Economics
The Economics of Pricelessness
As Exhibit A, I give you Apple during the reign of Steve Jobs at the top of the Apple reputation economy. That Apple at the time was primarily a reputation economy, and only secondarily a computing hardware market, is clear from the fact that there is a clear hierarchy in its market, with users at the bottom, genius-bar reps one level up, and an invisible secret church in the background with Jobs at the top. Now that he’s gone, the fate of the company depends on the ability of Tim Cook to play St. Peter well.
Income Inequality and its Sources
Technical change that has spread to many countries and is biased toward using more skilled labor and capital is a major source of greater income inequality, but it is also a major source of economic growth. Since economic growth has been a major source of poverty reduction since the Industrial Revolution, it would be prudent to recognize that redistribution policies come at a cost.
A Grieving Father Pulls a Thread That Unravels BNP’s Illegal Deals
A bus bombing two decades ago — and a New Jersey father’s quest for justice — inadvertently set off a chain of events that led American prosecutors to accuse some of the world’s biggest banks of transferring money for nations like Iran.
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“The fact that our case laid the groundwork for these actions is really a tribute to Alisa who would be 40 this year,” he said.
Greenpeace Statement on Foreign Currency Exchange Losses
The losses are a result of a serious error of judgment by an employee in our International Finance Unit acting beyond the limits of their authority and without following proper procedures. Greenpeace International entered into contracts to buy foreign currency at a fixed exchange rate while the euro was gaining in strength. This resulted in a loss of 3.8 million euros against a range of other currencies.
