As Bill Gates makes the rounds promoting Microsoft’s new operating system and everybody yawns, it’s worth recalling just how scary and important his company seemed a decade ago. Just to pluck a few examples from the 1990s pages of Fortune: Microsoft was going to extend its dominance from desktops to handhelds. It was going to [...]
I’ve always thought index funds were pretty cool. On average, stock mutual funds do worse than unmanaged indexes like the S&P 500 and Russell 1000. So if you buy a fund that only trails the index by a teeny bit, as most index funds are able to do because of their super-low fees, you’re already [...]
Every time bad news breaks for U.S. automakers, journalists and other observers offer one of two main explanations. One is that Detroit doesn’t make very good cars, or at least doesn’t make them efficiently enough. The other is that American automakers are so burdened by the retiree health care and pension commitments that they made [...]
My post the other day about the Webcomic Achewood (it was actually about newspaper economics, but since most of its traffic seems to have come from a link that Chris Onstad put up on his site, I guess that makes it about Achewood), has been generating a steady stream of mostly fascinating comments. Here are [...]
As promised, I asked Larry Summers what he does for D.E. Shaw. Being the hedge fund guy that he is now, he wouldn’t tell me anything on the record. But I can quote from the D.E. Shaw press release announcing his arrival: Dr. Summers will be involved on a part-time basis in various strategic initiatives [...]
There’s a great story in today’s Wall Street Journal (you have to pay to read it) about the brouhaha surrounding ousted Citi wealth-management boss Todd Thomson‘s expense accounts. He was taking Maria Bartiromo to dinner at Daniel (danger, cubicle-dwellers! site plays music!), flying her around Asia, and–most impressively, by my lights–getting a wood-burning fireplace installed [...]
A commenter to my post on hedge funds argues that since Larry Summers is an economist, he’s not necessarily just hedge fund window dressing. Larry’s not just an economist, he’s one of the great economists of his generation. But I still don’t believe David Shaw hired him for advice on arbitrage strategies. That said, I’ll [...]
So I didn’t actually watch the State of the Union address, other than the Dikembe Mutombo moment. Veronica Mars had a monkey to find, Alabama was playing Auburn in basketball … Plus, I got out of political reporting a long time ago in part because I really can’t take speeches. Still, I am capable of [...]
Daniel Gross has a new piece up on Slate about all the former big-name government officials joining or starting hedge funds. He lists a few (Madeleine Albright! Larry Summers! John Snow! Former SEC chairman Richard Breeden!), then writes: Let’s set aside the question of whether the arrival of politicians is a neon sign to hedge-fund [...]
In his paean to Webcomic Achewood the other day, my fellow time.com blogger Lev Grossman mentioned in passing that “I always loved comic strips—that was the sole reason my family ever bought the Boston Globe growing up.” That got me thinking. There’s been a ton written about how Craigslist is wiping out the newspaper classified [...]
