The Boston Globe had a story Monday (which is making the rounds today) about the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s decision last year to switch from investing mostly in fixed-income securities to a mix of 45% fixed-income, 45% equities, 5% real estate and 5% private equity. This was the lede: Just months before the start of [...]
Amartya Sen has an essay in the New York Review of Books (thanks for the tip, pneogy) that I really like. First, he neatly dispenses with the notion that we need to ditch or entirely reinvent capitalism: [D]o we really need some kind of “new capitalism” rather than an economic system that is not monolithic, [...]
I’ve been amazed at the tough line the Obama administration has taken on Detroit in the past few days. But David Brooks thinks it’s all show: [B]y enmeshing the White House so deeply into G.M., Obama has increased the odds that March’s menacing threat will lead to June’s wobbly wiggle-out. The Obama administration and the [...]
I wrote a story for Time.com. It begins: As the economic slump persists, companies are becoming stingier with the severance packages they offer laid-off workers. At the same time, more employees are asking their firms to tweak the terms of their parting pay — a shot to get more as they head for the door… [...]
Simon Johnson’s new Atlantic article The Quiet Coup—about how the crony capitalists of the U.S. financial sector have corrupted our system—has been getting a lot of deserved attention. But Dani Rodrik isn’t so sure about Johnson’s proposed remedy, and I think Rodrik has a point: Simon’s account is based on a very simple, and I [...]
I’m watching a video of a speech that Blackstone boss Steve Schwarzman gave at the Japan Society in New York a few weeks back (private equity is my topic of the week), and suddenly there he is attempting to answer Barbara’s question of why it’s apparently okay to stiff the bondholders at a car company [...]
One of the big constituencies involved in negotiating GM’s fate is, of course, GM bondholders. Last I read, GM was looking for its bondholders to turn in at least two-thirds of their debt in exchange for equity and new debt. Ford, that anomalously self-sufficient American car company, is reducing its debtload, too—buying back or retiring [...]
A reader writes, in response to my Upside of Anger column on taxing Wall Street bonuses: You appear to have a positive outlook regarding the government using the tax system to punish entities they don’t agree with. And you dare use the term “CAPITALIST” in your byline?? How hypocritical can one get?? Here is my [...]
Evan Thomas’s Newsweek cover story on Paul Krugman is timely, and—as with everything Thomas does—elegantly executed. I especially liked this passage: If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he’s wrong, and you sense he’s being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but you have a [...]
So Rick Wagoner is out at General Motors, at the request of the Obama administration. I’ve never known quite to make of the guy—most of GM’s many troubles aren’t his doing at all, but he had eight years to resolve them and came nowhere close to succeeding. I went to Alex Taylor’s November 25 Fortune [...]
