The excitement over my column on the swellness of the Dutch pension system continues. Here’s the reaction of Steve Utkus, who runs the Vanguard Center for Retirement Research: The Dutch system is interesting but has some limitations from a European perspective. One is that it ties benefits to working in the Netherlands, a small country [...]

Today’s NRC Handelsblad has an article outlining a recent change in fortunes (for the better) at Rotterdam’s Feyenoord soccer club. One of the reasons is a new program called “Talent Pool” (they failed to come up with a proper Dutch name for it) which allowed outside investors to buy a stake in the transfer rights [...]

My latest column is in the issue of the magazine with Rupert Murdoch on the cover and online here. It begins: On June 22, shares in the private-equity firm Blackstone Group began trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange. By late afternoon, CEO Stephen Schwarzman’s 23% stake in the firm he co-founded was worth [...]

At halftime, when the score was still 1-1, I was gearing up to write an embarrassingly gushing post about our brave young band of second stringers and their glorious performance against Argentina’s A team. But Messi, Tevez, and Co. ended up winning 4-1 (although the U.S. team certainly never embarrassed itself). So I will quote [...]

Someone calling himself The Epicurean Dealmaker has determined that I need to “spanked” for something I wrote Wednesday, and it pains me to admit that this TED is right. Actually, it doesn’t pain me all that much to admit that he’s right, since the opportunity to have my more ill-considered arguments swatted down by knowledgeable [...]

Because I know that what readers of this blog really want to see is photos of flaming trucks on the New Jersey Turnpike, I pulled out my camera phone when this vista appeared before me during an automotive voyage to the Garden State this morning: Disappointingly, the flames were no longer raging by the time [...]

Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman found out Wednesday that he could be spending more than 10 years behind bars for appointing former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy to a state hospital regulatory commission in exchange for a $500,000 Scrushy contribution to Siegelman’s unsuccessful campaign for a state lottery. Scrushy, the federal judge in Montgomery said, could [...]

At the request of several commenters to my post on how U.S. corporate tax rates compare internationally (they’re really high), I have now dug out the OECD’s estimates of the taxes corporations actually paid, as a share of GDP, in 2005. As best I can tell, you have to pay money to the OECD or [...]

Calculated Risk, a really smart financial blog that because I’m a navel-gazing MSMer I only read for the first time last week, had a post over the weekend (link via Barry Ritholtz) mocking the New York Times for explaining away Bear Stearns’ hedge fund problems as “fallout from loose lending practices that showered money on [...]