From a Larry Lessig review of Robert Reich’s new book, Supercapitalism (via Ezra Klein): [W]e need to understand the nature of the corporation — to make money — and come to love it, and yet, to keep it in its proper place, just as you can love a tiger, but know that it’s not the [...]

The guy sitting at the table next to mine at the Fair Trade Coffee House here in Madison had a Dell laptop. He asked me for help. It was his son’s computer, he said, and he couldn’t figure out how to make the wifi work. I looked at the screen for a minute and finally [...]

I guess I should mention at some point that I’m writing this week from America’s most insanely livable city, Madison, Wisconsin. Above is the view from my table at the Fair Trade Coffee House on State Street, where I’m typing these very words. Here’s a view down State Street toward the Capitol: I’m in Madison [...]

Stock markets around the world are having another crummy day. It’s always worth reiterating that the plus or minus 2% daily drops we’ve been seeing are nothing compared with the more than 20% decline on Oct. 19, 1987. But this decline is not the product of some weird hiccup in the workings of financial markets, [...]

Hedge fund manager and poker ace David Einhorn was the speaker at the 17th annual Graham & Dodd breakfast Friday morning. I arrived too late to get a seat, and left early because I was starving, but I did write down this quote: Regulators are good at cleaning up fraud after the money is gone. [...]

Today’s the big day! The 20th anniversary of the Crash of 1987! We’ve already been deluged with reminiscences and will-it-happen-agains. If you want more, my friend and fellow Acalanes High School graduate Matthew Rees’s recounting in The American is the most thoughtful and exhaustive I’ve seen. But, uh, will it happen again? Depends what it [...]

Yep, that’s him, the universally beloved New York Times columnist and author of the new book The Conscience of a Liberal (not to be confused with The Conscience of a Liberal). Why such a low-quality photo? Well, this is now the third in a series of Curious Capitalist posts featuring lousy cameraphone photos from book [...]

In India, a lot of people are apparently worked up about the fact that the rupee has appreciated 20% against the dollar over the past five years. No matter that it had lost 85% of its value against the dollar over the previous two decades–the rise in the rupee now is seen as alarming and [...]

Following the example of Fox Business Channel, I’ve decided to make this a more aspirational business blog (no, not really, but bear with me for this post). So I thought I’d share the inspiring story of Aaron Perlut, with whom I had breakfast Wednesday. Here’s Aaron, as captured by my cameraphone: Aaron, as you can [...]