Financial Markets

Assault on Wall Street

Uwe Boll's solution to the crash? Bloodshed.

George Jarkesy: Conservative Talking Head, Host to Radio Show in Investments, Gets Slammed by SEC

A local radio host who splits his time between spouting right-wing dogma and offering investment advice has been hit with a cease-and-desist order from the Securities and Exchange Commission. George R. Jaresky, Jr. hosts a show on KTEK-AM 1100 (Official motto: "Yes, We Exist") and is semi-syndicate ... More >>

Zombies and Fiscal Cliffs

The 10 most overhyped stories of 2012.

Superstorms, Mayans, Zombies and BDSM: The 10 Most Over-Hyped Stories of 2012

Journalists are really fond of writing about stories that went underreported every year. Too often, however, they forget to remind us all that those critical stories that went without needed coverage did so because stories with little merit wound up filling the airwaves and pages of newspapers. Unf ... More >>

Country Club Sopranos

American banks are on a massive crime spree. Obama and Romney hope you won’t notice.

Barbarians in the Ivory Tower

America's for-profit colleges offer education only a con man (or a congressman) could love.

Low-Alcohol Vermentino from California Makes Me Happy

The winemakers behind Uvaggio Vermentino from Lodi have a theory. "If we grow the right grape in the right place," they write on their website, "we can manage to get by with our respective degrees in psychology and geography. (If one of us gets lost then other can figure out why.) However, when you ... More >>

America's Petro-Terrorists

Wall Street and Washington conspire to destablize the U.S. economy, one barrel of oil at a time.

Early NFL Season Win Total Lines Have Brought Out a New Trash-Talky Side of Bob McNair

"I think we are a contender, so that's no surprise to me. I guess they got tired of losing money out there, putting our over-and-under too low, so they're getting more realistic." -- Houston Texans owner Bob McNair trash-talking the oddsmakers when asked about the Texans' status as favorites in the ... More >>

Sorry, Mark Zuckerberg: 10 Reasons Why I'm Not Spending $40 To Buy A Facebook Share

Here's a scoop: Facebook is having an IPO today. This under-the-radar stock sale will make billions for investors. Although everyone is keeping things on the down-low, the IPO means -- I'm guessing here, Wall Street is really not my forte -- that you can buy a share of Facebook stock, currently tra ... More >>

Bill Moyers at Progressive Forum: An East Texas Sage's Optimism Twists in Today's Ill Winds

Bill Moyers believes that the sun-baked scattered bones of Wall Street's carcass are being picked clean by "animal spirits" -- namely, hyenas, and that these scavengers believe that they are justified, indeed morally sanctioned, in behaving as such, and that nobody in government is willing or able t ... More >>

Occupy Wall Street: 99 Percent Protesters March to City Hall for Occupy Houston

See lots more pics of the protest in our slideshow. Joining a movement of protests across the country, several hundred Houstonians gathered at Market Square Park this morning to march to Hermann Square in front of City Hall, which they plan to occupy indefinitely in solidarity with the Occupy Wall ... More >>

Sacrifice Nothing

In the fantasy I Don't Know How She Does It, working moms can have it all.

Robert Copeland: A Ponzi Schemer Gets Ponzi Schemed Out of $10 Million

The Ponzi-er gets Ponzied. And pwned.​You are so freaking clever and smart that you have scammed $45 million out of 125 people in a Ponzi scheme. So when someone offers you a risk-free return of 30-40 percent on foreign exchange markets with a personal guarantee you will at least get your mone ... More >>

Texas Cities and Nonprofit Entities to Get About $3.5 Million in National Settlement of JPMorgan Suit

Settlement helps, a little.​Financial giant JPMorgan has agreed to pay $228 million to settle charges that it manipulated deals involving the government bond market, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott says the state's portion of it will be about $3.5 million. The money will go to Texas mu ... More >>

For Friday the 13th: Five of the Unluckiest Texans Ever

Investors held on too long.​Beginning with LaSalle, the French explorer who survived shipwrecks and cannibal Karankawa Indian attacks only to perish at the hands of his own men near Navasota, some people in Texas have had some pretty damned hard luck. You might lay some or all of the blame at ... More >>

SexBeerandMoney.com -- The Ten Most Expensive Domain Names

You'd be CRAZY not to want in on one of these domain names!​There was a time when a million bucks was a lot of money for a domain name. That's exactly what Cool.com went for back in 2000. Today, that's chump change when you are talking about the most expensive domain names on the Web. Keep in ... More >>

Houston Is A Global City, Foreign Policy Magazine Declares

Photo courtesy GHCVBA global city....with a disappointing football team​Foreign Policy magazine, desperate to hike pageviews now that their "Hottest Women of Diplomacy" issue is a thing of the past (or of our imagination) has ranked the 65 "Global Cities" of the world.The magazine looked at 65 cit ... More >>

Wall Street Bailout

Stone's sequel lets the bad guys off easy.

Where Are We Drinking?

I have little to no idea of what is going on in this photo, but I keep thinking of the foreign exchange student scene -- "Cheetah! Rawrrrr!" -- in my generation's seminal classic, Can't Hardly Wait. Leave your own thoughts as to what's happening in this picture as well as your guess as to where we'r ... More >>

HISD Says No Mas to Foreign-Exchange Students Automatically Getting Into Some Schools

Au revoir, limitless foreign-exchange students​The High School for the Performing and Visual Arts -- a much-esteemed program in the Houston ISD that students all over the district apply for and compete to get into -- this year has five foreign exchange students.That means, HISD Chief Academic Offi ... More >>

SPECIAL LABOR DIA EDITION

La Migra, NAFTA and one piece at a time

Separation of Church and Finances: Pastor Swipes $462,000 Through False Investments

Time to replant the money tree​Let your minister or rabbi or guru give you spiritual advice, but leave the financial dealings to your broker or accountant. The case of Jeremiah Yancy, aka Jeremiah Glaub, is a perfect example. While the pastor of a church in Idaho, Yancy managed to coax 64 individ ... More >>

Canadian Tar Sands: Environmentalists Claim Houston To Be End Point Of Worst Project In The World

You can't just go shooting for some food and find bubbling crude anymore​Other than desperation, is there much to recommend Canadian tar sands as a fuel source?Not according to Matthew Tejada of Air Alliance Houston. During a talk at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church last night, he described th ... More >>

Mushrooms Gone Wild

Wild mushroom and walnut tortellini at D'Amico's Italian Market Cafe

Save A Houston Librarian, Buy A Book

​While Hair Balls is fearful of ever-expanding government power and its attendant death panels and Wall Street takeovers, there is one government institution we absolutely love: libraries. We're total whores for literacy and recreational/ educational reading. Which is why we're stoked for the ... More >>

Downing Street Pub's Downing Street Draft

Fails Of The Week: Glastonbury "Ice Ice Baby," Sony "No Beyonce On YouTube," Fat Mike The Peeing Clown And... Bono

If you're reading this, you're either on the Internet, or else you've mastered multi-dimensional thought-projection processes that would make Michio Kaku cry like a little girl. We'll assume the former, and just in case you don't already know, the Internet has decided that the word "failure" is too ... More >>

How To Help Wall Street Bankers In Haiti's Time Of Need

​We Americans are a generous people. In the days after the devastating Haitian earthquake, we whipped out our credit cards and donated millions to relieve that stricken, jinxed nation.But until Thursday, when the Huffington Post got wind of the practices, the major credit companies (including ... More >>

City of Coffee

Is Houston about to become America's coffee capital?

Yep, Speculators Caused Last Year's Oil-Price Spike, Rice Says

​A couple of researchers at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy have released a study that gets close to proving that speculators caused oil prices to shoot up in 2008. This theory is nothing new, but the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency that regulates U.S. futu ... More >>

John Birmingham

The author of Without Warning just might be giving us one

How Can Exxon Make A Giant Profit And Conoco A Giant Loss? Gas Is Gas, Right?

After reading about ExxonMobil's record $45.2 billion annual profit, Hair Balls was scratching our head over why Exxon had a profitable fourth quarter, when Conoco lost $31.8 billion. Does Exxon jack up the cost of Little Debbies at its stores or something?Fortunately, we caught Hoover's Oil & G ... More >>

Is 1986 Coming Again to Houston?

The ever-cheerful blogger Lou Minatti, by way of warning everyone about Houston's coming fiscal apocalypse, has unearthed a 1986 Time article largely comparing booming Massachusetts and oil-bust Texas.Houston plays a part: Houston is the big city hardest hit. The town once giddily expansive on oil m ... More >>

Summer Drinks: Greek Frappe

BBAP Xmas Tree Project

Local artists create a different type of seasonal decoration

Drenched In Blog: Meg White Sex Tape?

Letters to the Editor

Wize Guys

Here's your chance to get rich quick -- or lose your shirt, in which case, GlobalTec disavows all responsibility for, well, anything

Diva of the Deal

How Enron's high temptress turned massive projects into a $2 billion wet dream for the company -- and an estimated $100 million profit for herself

Up In Smoke

Enron used political ties to rid itself of regulators. But in the end, its supposed free-market trailblazing only burned investors.

Catching a Big One

Moody hooks a $75 million verdict against a fish farm and a law firm

Rejected

Thousands of inmates rely annually on a capricious parole board for their freedom. Most, like George Dismukes, return to their cells without ever knowing why they were denied.

The Inkblot Test

Do you prefer old greasy diners? Or imitations of old greasy dinners?

The Insider

Shakedown Cruise: Mugging Rice is not nice on its first stroll through Mayor Brown's turf

Hot Plate

Need or Greed

A Bible-quoting con man finds easy pickings among those looking for a miracle or a windfall

Biological Disaster

Zonagen Inc. took its name from Bonnie Dunbar's groundbreaking research into contraceptive vaccines. Then, when she wasn't looking, the company took her research.

Simple Delight

At the Triple A, the food lives up to the rating in the name

The Wendy Card

Wendy Gramm's all-American success story is a centerpiece of her husband's fledgling presidential bid. But there's more to the story than what's being packaged and sold by the Phil Gramm campaign.