How many shares of AIG stock do I get when I file my 2008 taxes?

Want to understand the ramifications of the recent market chaos?

The New York Times is running one of the best (and simplest) interactive information graphics I've seen in a long time.

Static snapshots below, which don't begin to do justice to what they've built.

Market cap of 29 selected financial firms in October 2007:



...and the 27 surviving firms in September 2008:

Jim Cramer's famous rant, one year later

Cramer Day is upon us. This weekend marks the anniversary of former hedge fund manager Jim Cramer’s outburst on CNBC that the Federal Reserve was “asleep” and that there was “Armageddon” in the fixed income markets.

It was possibly the most entertaining five minutes of financial television ever broadcast. Those who do not work in a Wall Street trading room and have not watched the excerpt repeatedly over the past year, can watch it on YouTube, where it is a popular view.

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The outburst signalled for the first time to the general public in the US that the largely technical problems for the credit market could have serious repercussions for them.

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Reviewing the rant, we can see it set the template for all that followed.

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Finally, Cramer wanted to pin the blame on Alan Greenspan, who had left the Federal Reserve with an impeccable reputation early in 2006. He pointed out, correctly, that Greenspan had encouraged borrowers to take out mortgages at low “teaser” rates and then proceeded to raise rates.

Those comments have become the new orthodoxy. The easy money with which the Greenspan Fed responded to the bursting of the tech bubble at the beginning of this decade is now deemed a mistake.

This was the first crisis to afflict the YouTube generation. The “Rant That Shook The World” as CNBC called it, will be an important item in financial history years from now.

Long view: Jim Cramer’s TV outburst that will last for ages (Financial Times, 1 August 2008)

A warm, personal gesture from senior executives to themselves

When even the Wall Street Journal is delicately holding its nose while describing how your company is funding its executive pension scheme, you know trouble's on the way:

At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.

In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.

The practice has drawn scant notice. A close examination by The Wall Street Journal shows how it works and reveals that the maneuver, besides being a dubious use of tax law, risks harming regular workers. It can drain assets from pension plans and make them more likely to fail. Now, with the current bear market in stocks weakening many pension plans, this practice could put more in jeopardy.

Companies Tap Pension Plans to Fund Executive Benefits (WSJ, 4 August 2008)