San Diego entrepreneur David Perez loves to talk about his good deeds: last month, he got reams of local and national publicity after he rounded up airplanes to fly evacuees out of hurricane-battered southern states. …

Remember the Alamo? Remember the Maine? Forget both. Remember March of 2000 if you're concerned about your economic future. That month has meaning for today. It's when the stock market bubble of the 1990s peaked …

San Diego hates being considered a satellite of Los Angeles -- until there is a crisis. You see, Los Angeles and environs are San Diego's crisis cushion. When the U.S. economy is weak, and large …

The City of San Diego doesn't know its assets from a hole in the ground, and neither does the San Diego City Employees' Retirement System, we learned last week. So what else is new? Sloppy …

San Diegans neck deep in debt may feel a noose tightening next month: a stringent new bankruptcy law goes into effect October 17, at the same time credit-card issuers will be boosting minimum monthly payments. …

Will San Diego be Karl Rove's Waterloo? President George W. Bush has now made two monumental missteps while addressing San Diego sailors. The blunders have energized his opponents and enraged some of his supporters. The …

Forget those jokes: blondes are not dumb. The proof is the former Nancy Hoover Hunter -- now named Nancy Fletcher and once again living in luxury in San Diego County. She and her husband of …

Those who point fingers should have clean hands. But outside consultants pocketing big bucks to pinpoint San Diego's financial woes are themselves suspected of having sticky fingers. Four law, accounting, and investigative firms have wangled …

Economists say that when you tax something, you get less of it. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. San Diego County is on the fast track to subsidizing cannibalism. A proposed Chula …

This is a tale of an author and an alchemist. One writes books about corporate governance, and the other says he can make mercury into gold. That's a feat that alchemists and assorted mystics of …

Without question, nerds boost the local economy. But so do smerfs. Indeed, San Diego should post a sign on the outskirts: "Smerfs Welcome." Smerfs are notorious cheapskates, but their dollars are green. In the tourist …

It's a sorry state of affairs when your ace in the hole is a black hole: possible bankruptcy. That's the situation with the City of San Diego: its best defense against another pillaging by the …

San Diegans wring their hands about political corruption as if it's something new. Ha. It would be better to ruminate on the economic and societal framework that has long encouraged and rewarded such corruption. The …

June was nirvana for both lovers and haters of securities-fraud attorney Bill Lerach. Admirers exulted that super-banks J.P. Morgan and Citigroup agreed to shell out a combined $4.2 billion for their roles in the Enron …

Mayoral candidate Steve Francis wants to introduce business techniques to city government. Uh-oh. That may mean hocus-pocus -- financial engineering. Since going public in 2001, the company Francis cofounded, San Diego-based AMN Healthcare Services, has …

Gulp. Glacier-brand water, which you can get from supermarket vending machines all over the county, should be safe to drink. But I can't say it's safe to invest in the stock of the parent company, …

Gerald R. "Jerry" Sanders and William Robert "Bob" Bradley are friends and business associates. Each faces problems. Sanders's potential woes are voluntary: he wants to be mayor of a financially ailing city, San Diego. Bradley's …

This January, Stephen L. Baum will retire as Sempra Energy's chief executive in fine shape (rich as Croesus) and at a fine time (as the company faces a jury in a potentially backbreaking lawsuit). Maybe …

In chaotic times, outsiders have the inside track. So-called "outside" lawyers, accountants, consultants, actuaries, investment bankers, and self-proclaimed experts-for-hire are like taxicab drivers: they salivate when the meter is running. Often, opposing lawyers, feigning belligerence, …

It's bad enough to have a fox guarding the henhouse. Having a Cox guard one suggests that the corporate crook will once again be the cock of the walk, crowing as investors get skinned. Some …

He had a passion to do well. She had a passion to do good. Together, they touted his investment scheme, which bilked a thousand investors of $80 million. He has confessed to planning and running …

Plop! It's not a baseball dropping into a mitt. It's a company falling into Wall Street's doghouse. Still another corporation that shelled out bucks to have its name on a pro-sports stadium has taken a …

“I was distressed to find out that he was so close to the whole Copley organization, and here I was working for them. I came into a situation where I was really walking on eggs.”

Now that criminal charges have been filed against former and current pension-fund trustees, some San Diegans feel the city has hit bottom. There is nowhere to go but up. Not so. Individuals and institutions in …

'From what I have been through, I call this city 'The Banana Republic of San Diego.' It appears that we have a system of government not built on laws, but on relationships. That is the …

You read it everywhere: the city of San Diego may be broke, but the underlying regional economy is robust. Sorry. I can't agree. The local economy appears strong now but sits on a powder keg. …

To weave a cleverly tangled web of secret offshore tax havens, sometimes it takes two to tangle. If the two tanglers are dead,it can be difficult for government investigators to penetrate the maze. Despite this …

For years, San Diego subsidized affluent effluent. Now, victims want compensation. In mid May, superior-court judge Ronald Prager is slated to hear arguments in a case filed on behalf of city residential property owners who …

San Diego is known for both big and small stock-market scams. Peregrine Systems is a big half-a-billion-dollar scam -- right up there with Enron, WorldCom, et al. But San Diego is also called Pump-and-Dumpsville because …

San Diegans have just seen what life under a strong mayor system will be like. Thank goodness, an attempted coup last week was planned so mindlessly and executed so clumsily that future such attempts will …

'Someday this mess will end up in the media," wrote an irate Terri Webster in an e-mail on August 13, 1999. Oh, how prescient her words were. Webster, then assistant city auditor, was writing to …

A letter that has fallen into the Reader's hands reveals that the City of San Diego will have to confess many more accounting sins once it gets new audits from outside firms poring over its …

Consultant celebrities are like Hollywood celebrities: they're hired more for show than substance. This is just one of many reasons San Diego taxpayers should cock an eyebrow at the city's hiring of two former top …

It was quintessential San Diego: the son made news stiffing his stock-brokerage customers while the parents made Burl Stiff's Union-Tribune column glorifying the Beautiful People. It went on for years, and the parents were part-owners …

Jurors who had spent eight days hearing a medical malpractice case were stunned when it was declared a mistrial February 28. All 15 jurors told the plaintiff's attorneys that they would have found the physician …

'Dear San Diego Tourism Industry: Stay as sweet as you are. Leave the vice to Vegas. But in playing the ingénue, don't get cute with the statistics, as your convention center is now doing. If …

For more than three decades, San Diego icon WD-40 didn't have to worry about competition. It sold a legendary lubricant by a name that came to be used in 80 percent of U.S. homes. Profits …

On air: beware. Cock an eyebrow at money advisors who flaunt their expertise over the airwaves. They may be getting secretly paid to tout a stock or have an undisclosed relationship with a firm they …

'Enron by the Sea" is outdated. Next up: "Buffoonery by the Bay." In an attempt to attract industry and capital, the San Diego establishment placed a special advertising section in the January 3 issue of …

Always assume that promoters claiming they're out to do good are out to do well. And companies whose mission is saving the world are trying to pocket your savings. Last week, Amr (Anthony) Elgindy, a …

San Diego's "EEEK" shriek was not, unfortunately, the "EEEK" heard round the world or the country or county or city or even city hall, where it should have set off a cry, "The Red Ink …

WALL STREET is predicting that 2005 will be a year of corporate marriages and initial public offerings of common stocks, and the Street is rejoicing. No doubt for Wall Street, resumption of both kinds of …

'The foxes are being promoted," says attorney Michael Conger. "You can't take seriously anything the city says about cleaning up this mess as long as they keep giving promotions to the chief architects of the …

A tsunami originating in the little town of Clinton, Mississippi, could soon whack the larger town of San Diego, California. Clinton was the home base of WorldCom, an $11 billion accounting fraud in the telecom …

City government's culture of secrecy has bred something worse: a culture of deceit. The history of the 2002 ballpark bonds proves the point. Federal and local investigators, in their criminal and civil probes into the …

Set cynicism aside. The ballot-bubble hubbub may yet bring a happy ending: the swearing-in of a legitimately elected mayor, Donna Frye. This column offers an agenda for Frye's first term. She was not consulted, of …

The moniker "America's Finest City" is tarnished. Don't be surprised if city spinmeisters turn up the hyperbole volume, christening San Diego as a "World-Class City." Keep in mind that the "America's Finest City" honorific was …

It's great to have an internationally recognized name -- except when it gets dragged through the mud. Consider economist Arthur B. Laffer, a resident of Rancho Santa Fe. He is considered the father of supply-side …

The world's biggest maker of baseball gloves can't make any errors. The company, K2 Inc., moved to Carlsbad from Santa Monica last year. It has more than a billion dollars in annual sales of sporting …

One misguided belief today is that if we lower tax rates of corporations and the rich, there will be less tax avoidance and evasion. Money stashed in offshore havens will float back to the U.S. …