What We Read Today 25 March 2014

Econintersect: Every day our editors collect the most interesting things they find from around the internet and present a summary “reading list” which will include very brief summaries of why each item has gotten our attention. Suggestions from readers for “reading list” items are gratefully reviewed, although sometimes space limits the number included.

• How Obama Crippled a Russian Bank with a Stroke of a Pen (Rob Garver, The Fiscal Times) It was not a big bank, more like a credit union which was the banker for 20 members of Putin’s inner circle who have been sanctioned by the U.S. government. But because all U.S. banks are prohibited from doing business with Bank Rossiya, that shuts the Russian institution out of global banking interactions because virtually every bank in the world does business with one or more U.S. banks. It becomes a question of doing business with Bank Rossiya or doing business with everyone else.

• Wanted: crime-fighting academics to catch corporate criminals (Mike Marinetto, The Conversation) “Behind every fortune lies a great crime.” Attributed to Honore de Balzac (1799-1850). Thus starts this article which immediately commits a faux pas by identifying Balzac as an 18th century man of letters. But the essay overcomes that error to carry out an effective short discussion of ethics, business and criminality.

• Obama’s aim to shift U.S. foreign policy runs up against an old Cold War rival (Scott Wilson, The Washington Post) Econintersect opinion: Just as France made the mistake of punishing Germany for losing WW I, The U.S. made the mistake of “punishing” Russia for losing the Cold War. A little reaching out from Bush 1 or Bill Clinton might have changed history. A little coaching from Nelson Mandella would have gone a long way.

• Time to turn back the tide of drug-resistant tuberculosis (Justin Denholm, Ben Marais, Jo Chandler and Suman Majumdar, The Conversation) A drug resistant form of tuberculosis is reviving a 19th century scourge of consumption in the 21st century. The disease has the strongest foothold in Asia.

• The Federal Reserve on Monday issued full corrected results for the 2014 Dodd-Frank Act stress test. (Press Release) Here is the full corrected report (pdf). GEI News followed this debacle as it unfolded, here and here. Did the Healthcare.gov website developers move on to producing reports for the Fed?

• 5 Former Madoff Aides Found Guilty of Fraud (Rachel Abrams, DealBook, The New York Times) Hat tip to John O’Donnell. A federal jury on Monday found five associates of the convicted swindler Bernard L. Madoff guilty on 31 counts of aiding one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. The convictions came on charges that the five knowingly conspired to carry out fraud against Madoff clients. Nine other Madoff employees had previously plead guilty to charges of fraud.

There are 12 more articles discussed ‘behind the wall’ today.