As Wall Streeters go, John Thain had done a pretty impressive job of maintaining his reputation amid the financial carnage of the past couple years. But I’m starting to wonder if any of the Wall Street establishment is going to come out of this mess looking even remotely respectable. Thain had risen through the ranks [...]
My new column is online and in the issue of TIME with some guy flubbing his oath of office on the cover. It begins: City Bank of New York was founded in 1812 by a group of merchants hoping to fill the void left by the demise of the first Bank of the United States, [...]
In today’s NYT, David Leonhardt digs up some obscure Labor Department statistics to document something I’ve been touching on in this blog: So far, at least, this recession can only be said to be the worst since 1982. Including discouraged workers … the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent last month. Another 5.2 percent of the [...]
From the prologue to Phillip L. Zweig’s Wriston: Walter Wriston, Citibank, and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremacy (1995): To bring Citicorp back from the brink in the face of endless criticism, John Reed drew on the capacity for pain he had tapped into as chief of the once-troubled consumer business. As the [...]
Tim Geithner’s confirmation hearing will be held Wednesday. The members of the Senate Finance Committee will ask him lots of tough questions about his tax forms and maybe even the financial bailouts he orchestrated as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Some will raise their eyebrows disbelievingly at his answers. A few [...]
I’ve got a brief piece in today’s Der Standard, everybody’s favorite pink Austrian newspaper. It begins: Die USA haben im 20. Jahrhundert zwei große wirtschaftspolitische Kurswechsel erlebt —Franklin Roosevelts New Deal und die Reagan-Revolution in den Achtzigerjahren. Die Ankunft von Barack Obama im Weißen Haus in Zeiten des Finanzkollapses und einer tiefen Rezession erscheint wie [...]
Because I have the attention span of a gnat, I spaced out during the economic policy section of our new president’s Inaugural Address. So I went to the text. Here it is, with a little bit of annotation: We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when [...]
My new Barack Obama action figure, a gift from Mrs. Curious Capitalist and Curious Capitalist Jr., joins my windowsill team of Jack Bogle and Clarence Seedorf (depicted in an earlier phase of his life when he played for Inter Milan and had hair) just in time for Inauguration Day. I don’t want to be partisan [...]
In the past 20 minutes two different friends have emailed me to say they’re about to gather in their corporate auditoriums to watch the inauguration. We’ve got that going on here at Time Inc., too, though, you’ll notice, I’m still working away. Someone’s got to keep an eye on labor productivity. For slightly more informed [...]
Joe Klein argues that the Republican talking point that Obama’s stimulus plan will cost $275,ooo per new job created is “phony-baloney propaganda.” I had actually been thinking it was the best anti-stimulus argument that John Boehner’s office had managed to come up with so far (which isn’t saying much, but it’s saying more than “phoney-baloney”). [...]
