My new column (actually, it’s laid out in the magazine as a two-page article, but it’s really more like a column) is online and in the issue of Time with Hillary on the cover. It begins: This story features a man named Prince, an actual (Saudi) prince, a billionaire financial legend, a former Treasury Secretary [...]

A couple of months ago I lamented my struggle with the flood of blog posts that poured through my Google Reader, even though I only subscribed at the time to 16 feeds, and asked for advice about what to do. In the comments, Felix Salmon recommended that I “get get a proper (ie not web-based) [...]

Okay, I’ll admit it. I want to write like Nick Carr when I grow up: “Once every hundred years media changes,” boy-coder turned big-thinker Mark Zuckerberg declared today at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City. And it’s true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you’ll see that every century, [...]

What to make of the falling dollar? The Italian economist is hopeful (via Mark Thoma): Results from numerical exercises developed in joint work with Martin, and Pesenti, suggests that closing the US current account deficit (from 5% of GDP to zero) could lead to a combination of lower US consumption (-6%), and higher US employment [...]

Lots of people have been wondering when one of the big oil-exporting countries, fed up with the weakening dollar, will demand to be paid in euros. But few had been paying attention to the far greater threat that supermodels might demand payment in currency harder than the greenback. Until now: According to Brazil’s weekly magazine [...]

One great thing about business crises is the way they turn so many of us semi-amateurs into temporary financial geeks. Five years ago it was all about stock-option accounting and special purpose vehicles. Now it’s collateralizalized debt obligations, special investment vehicles, and my personal favorite of the moment, “level 3 assets.” These, sadly, don’t have [...]

Federal Reserve governor Frederic Mishkin gave a speech Monday at the Risk USA 2007 conference in New York. He said some interesting stuff: Two types of risks are particularly important for understanding financial instability. The first is what I will refer to as valuation risk: The market, realizing the complexity of a security or the [...]

Not long after the AOL-Time Warner merger was announced in 2000, Steve Case and Jerry Levin came to London to talk to all the UK AOLians and Time Warnerites about the deal. I had just moved to London a few months before, and the main thing I remember from the gathering was Case declaring that [...]

In the comments to my post on Chuck Prince’s resignation, somebody with the very creative handle “Anonymous” makes an excellent point: You may recall that Prince got the job when Citi was reeling from one legal scandal after another, which was not a Weill forte. If the trend continues, the next CEO will be good [...]