UCLA law professor and one-man-media-empire-in-the-making Stephen Bainbridge has responded to my response to his critique of my very first post on this blog, “Who needs a board of directors, anyway?” (Dizzy yet?) Bainbridge’s essay is highly erudite, with footnotes and everything. Reading it will, to quote an ill-fated Fortune ad campaign of a few years [...]
Michael Kinsley has a new piece in Slate this week purportedly offering “proof that the stock market is irrational.” As the someday-to-be-author of a book tentatively titled The Myth of the Rational Investor (due out early next year, if I get cracking on the rewrite), I ought to agree with him. But I just can’t [...]
Mrs. Curious Capitalist and I went to a performance Tuesday night by the Greatest Pop Singer of Our Age, Brazil’s Marisa Monte. It was swell and all, but it was also deeply weird–for the simple reason that I had no idea which songs were her hits. I think we own every CD by Ms. Monte, [...]
My last conversation with Milton Friedman–who died today at the age of 94–was in October 2005. I was working on an article about monetary policy after the impending retirement of Alan Greenspan and I figured it couldn’t hurt to consult the most important monetary economist of the past half century. (The most important monetary economist [...]
An expanded version of my post a couple weeks back about “spring-loading” and “bullet-dodging”–options practices that are less obviously illegal than backdating but still smell a little bit like insider trading–is now available in the pages of the Nov. 27 Fortune and online. One question that I didn’t address in the article, mainly because I [...]
The people at Der Spiegel, the German newsweekly, were nice enough to translate into English a pretty compelling article from last week’s issue. Here’s how it begins: They are fed up, truly fed up. Fed up with the constant bickering over the costs of wage benefits, social reforms, elimination of subsidies, store closing hours and [...]
During the just-concluded campaign, President Bush and other Republicans did what they could to convince voters that Democrats would raise taxes after the election. Voters didn’t seem to believe them or care, and the soon-to-be leaders of the Democratic House and Senate have been doing their best to emphasize that tax raising isn’t on their [...]
My experience with Daniel Ortega, who looks set to become the next president of Nicaragua, is limited to having watched a couple of baseball games in 1995 on a Managua field adjacent to the gated compound where he was said to live. But even that might be ever-so-slightly instructive about what is to come next. [...]
