Last Thursday, in a financial story that you may have missed, Nasdaq OMX Group announced that it had created a new index. It’s called the Nasdaq OMX Government Relief Index and it is now trading under the symbol QGRI. The components of the index will be the companies that receive $1 billion or more under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) or any other government handout program. There’s a kind of twisted logic to this new index, whose initial roster of companies includes Bank of America, Citigroup, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley. After all, if...
