St. Louis banker David Kemper doesn’t like some of the rhetoric he’s hearing about bank bailouts. In particular, he said this morning in a speech at Washington University’s Olin School of Business, he doeesn’t like the fact that banks have…

Jerry Von Rohr earned $460,548 last year as chief executive of Reliance Bancshares, a bank that  has received $40 million in government funding through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Reliance’s proxy statement, filed last week, says Von Rohr earned a…

As I said at the conclusion of today’s column, corporate types are already busy exploring the loopholes in President Barack Obama’s $500,000 pay limit for bailed-out executives.

The column mentions one loophole: The limit does not apply to restricted stock. In…

Enterprise Rent-A-Car spokesman Pat Farrell called me this afternoon to say that his company, and his industry, is not looking for a government bailout. He was responding, of course, to this post, which relied on a Wall Street Journal story.

The Journal, Farrell…

Update: See this followup post for more information.

The rental-car industry may be next in line for a federal bailout, the Wall Street Journal reports today.  Enterprise, Hertz and their competitors want help financing their new-car purchases, and they apparently…

Harry Markowitz, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, is one of the fathers of modern portfolio theory, and you can pretty much draw a straight line from his theoretical work to the financial engineering that underlies the derivatives market. So, when Markowitz weighs…

Last week’s taxpayer-financed takeover of National City by PNC could have golden consequences for three top bank executives. National City’s chief executive, Peter Raskind, and executive vice presidents Daniel Frate and Jon Gorney have golden-parachute contracts that guarantee big money in the event of a…

James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, says he doesn’t think market participants appreciate the extent to which risk has been removed from the financial system. Speaking as part of a Washington University panel on the financial…

David Kemper, chief executive of Commerce Bancshares, says he’s thinking seriously about applying for some of the $250 billion that the U.S. Treasury plans to invest in the banking system. He told a forum at Washington University:

They are clever enough that…

If you’re keeping score, we’ve already seen well over $1 trillion worth of bailouts this year, for everybody from Fannie Mae to the nation’s nine biggest banks. Jeffrey R. Brown, a professor of finance at the University of Illinois, says we…