Today brings us the economic-policy chapter of the big Washington Post series on how Dick Cheney runs America. It’s not nearly as dramatic or sinister-seeming as yesterday’s installment on torture ‘n’ stuff. Economic policy is like that, I guess. One big takeaway is that economic policy in the Bush administration is run not by the [...]
John Authers in the FT makes the point (subscription required) that the great flight from risk that people with respect for market history have been predicting for a while now still hasn’t come to pass: Angela Montero, of Société Générale, pointed out last week that Mexican bonds yielded 5.85 per cent. 10-year bonds in Colombia, [...]
From the latest fascinating essay by danah boyd, UC Berkeley grad student and online-social-networking guru (link via Howard Rheingold via joerissen): The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what [...]
A cousin who was passing through Schiphol over the weekend bought me a copy of my favorite newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad. I haven’t had time to actually read it yet, but I was immediately struck with how the NRC, always one of the widest newspapers on the planet, has so far resisted the trend toward [...]
Reader Marcus Choudhary has urged me to mention, amid all this talk about the sweet tax deal that private equity firms and private equity partners get, that corporate tax rates in the U.S. are pretty high. So if the folks at the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees really want to make our [...]
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein says it’s “emotion” that’s driving the Congressional push to change the tax treatment of private equity: “Right now, sentiment is what is really transcendent,” Mr Blankfein said in an interview with the Financial Times. “But as you get into the consequences . . . for competitiveness and fairness . . [...]
So Congress may actually take on the big tax break, if you want to call it that, enjoyed by investment partnerships like private equity, venture capital and hedge funds. According to today’s NYT: At the heart of the newest proposal is an attempt to bar private equity and hedge fund operators from a longstanding, but [...]
Back in March, when the whole subprime mortgage mess was beginning to hit the headlines, derivatives consultant Janet Tavokoli said something that both interested and alarmed me. Some of the big Wall Street firms appeared to have started betting against the subprime market at the beginning of the year and successfully protected themselves from the [...]
Carol Zurcher, CPA, of Winter Park, Fla., sent me a nice e-mail about my column on the strengths of the Dutch pension system, which has generated a spectacular lack of interest from Curious Capitalist readers. Here’s what she had to say: Thank you for your article “Where Retirement Works.” A large part of my practice [...]
Ever since that day in the late 1950s when entrepreneur Charles Lazarus named his second store Toys “Я” Us (the first, which specialized in kids’ furniture, was called Children’s Bargain Town), those who wrote about him struggled with that backwards R. You just couldn’t reproduce it in most newspapers and magazines, and in fact the [...]
