PBS is airing a two-part documentary starting tonight (what time? check your local listings) called Retirement Revolution, and I’m in it. I’m pretty sure I’m not in tonight’s episode, though it’s possible that just I missed myself while fast-forwarding through the podcast. But that doesn’t make it any less edifying. The show is a pretty [...]

You read it here first. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard now reports in the Telegraph (via Across the Curve) that the Federal Reserve thinks the Swedes (and Norwegians and Finns) might have something to teach us about financial bailouts: A senior official at one of the Scandinavian central banks told The Daily Telegraph that Fed strategists had stepped [...]

As I write this, Hank Paulson is finally giving his big speech on regulatory reform. But the great wave of reaction has been going on for a couple of days now. There are seven stories on the Paulson plan in today’s WSJ alone. My quick read of all the reactions is that Wall Street mostly [...]

Hank Paulson is going to make a speech Monday about what our financial regulatory system ought to look like. But the WSJ, NYT, WaPo, and LAT already have all the details. (Not a word yet in the FT, interestingly enough.) This latest of several “Paulson plans” (the full “executive summary” is here) is not directly [...]

So, long after Ana got to it on Swampland, I’ve finally read Barack Obama’s big financial regulation speech. His basic diagnosis of the problem is this: A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business has changed. But by the time the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed [...]

This time from comedian/actress Julia Sweeney (via PZ Myers): Ben Stein once did a Groundling show, an improv show, that I was a part of. I found him to be spectacularly ill-informed and narcissistic and weirdly devoted to his schtick and worst of all, hacky. He didn’t listen to his fellow performers and played everything [...]

Here it is, the fourth in my world-changing series of unhelpful photos of book parties (it was previously lo-res photos of book parties, but this time the fault lies not with the device but the photographer). The party was for Jeff Gordinier’s blockbuster X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can [...]

Michael Lewis on investment banks: To both their investors and their bosses, Wall Street firms have become shockingly opaque. But the problem isn’t new. It dates back at least to the early 1980s when one firm, Salomon Brothers, suddenly began to make more money than all the other firms combined. (Go look at the numbers: [...]

Felix Salmon has written an epic essay on just what makes Ben Stein such a threat to the republic. It’s very good, and very Karl Popper. Felix’s main complaint is that Stein is “anti-enlightenment.” Rather than offering explanations for the market’s behavior (or the evolution of the human race) that are falsifiable–that is, they could [...]