Sorry for the anemic posting this week. I seem to have mostly recovered from the horrible disease I had a couple days ago, although I’ve been warned by lots of people (including Curious Capitalist Jr.) that it will probably recur. And now I’m in Southern California for a family thing (the funeral of a beloved [...]

So I’m having breakfast this morning with Haiyan Wang and Anil K. Gupta, the wife-and-husband team behind the Maryland-based China India Institute (not under any circumstances to be confused with the India China Institute). They’re giving me their–quite compelling–spiel about just how amazingly unprecedentedly transformative the rise of China and India will be for the [...]

A mere three years ago, the nation’s two great government-created, privately owned, politically well-connected buyers of home mortgages, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were in disrepute. They’d both been buffeted by massive accounting scandals. Their CEOs had resigned in disgrace. Congress was talking about significantly reining in their powers. So what’s happening now? Congress approved [...]

One of the most fascinating economic stories of the past decade has been how the hapless investors who poured billions of dollars into Global Crossing, Worldcom and the like paved the way for the success of Indian outsourcers, Web 2.0 bandwidth hogs and all manner of other innovative enterprises. These telcos (over)built a global network [...]

Another poll question on the economic power of nations, this time from Gallup (via Greg Mankiw): “Which one of the following do you think is the leading economic power in the world today?” China: 40 percent The United States: 33 percent Japan: 13 percent The European Union: 7 percent India: 2 percent Russia: 2 percent [...]

So I’m back from skiing at (downhill) and near (cross country) Gore Mountain in the Adirondacks. The photo above is taken from somewhere around the top of the mountain. I’m pretty sure I took it right after making a couple of cell phone calls, because (a) I’m a total dork and (b) the tops of [...]

My colleague Andrea Sachs has a story in the Global Business section of this week’s magazine about Seth Godin’s latest book. Godin is something of a character, a marketing guy who sells a ton of books largely by feeding people recycled common sense. I met him last year and asked him about that — why [...]

The Associated Press had a great piece of enterprise reporting earlier this week about how much money California could get for privatizing its lottery. Governor Schwarzenegger has been throwing around the figure $37 billion — a particularly nice number considering the state faces a $14.5 billion budgetary shortfall — but the AP got its hands [...]

The Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, who is a professor up at Columbia University, swung by the office this morning for a meet-and-greet. Noble-Prize-winning… must be a nice way to be introduced. Stiglitz was here to promote his soon-to-be-published book on the true cost of the Iraq war, which he and Linda Bilmes of Harvard University [...]