I’m planning to attend some of the Buyouts East conference today to learn a little about what’s up in private equityland, and to prepare I’ve been leafing through a friend’s copy of Buyouts magazine. An opinion piece by managing editor Michael Baron caught my eye (it appears to be available online only to Buyouts subscribers). [...]
I’ve got a new piece up on TIME.com about the spate of slightly better-than-expected economic numbers we’ve been seeing over the past week or two. I make no bold predictions in it, but I’ll make one here: We are in fact seeing the beginning of the end of this recession in the U.S. But the [...]
This is off topic—although I guess it fits well with the new austerity—but I just blew 15 minutes on a friend’s mom’s website that tells me important things like how long is safe to keep an open bottle of blueberry preserves in the fridge (answer: one year). Or how about an open package of bacon? [...]
I’m not sure that I entirely understand all the points Hernando de Soto makes in his op-ed piece in the WSJ today, but this one sure is intriguing: If you think about it, everything of value we own travels on property paper. At the beginning of the decade there was about $100 trillion worth of [...]
Alpha magazine’s annual list of the 25 highest-paid hedgies is out, and confirms the fascinating truth that there still are a lot of staggeringly high-paid hedgies out there—even if fewer than the year before. Atop the list, at an estimated $2.5 billion, is Jim Simons, who was one of the highest-paid hedgies before all this [...]
This quote from Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, by way of historian Eric Rauchway, is awfully interesting: He was surprised and wounded at the way the upper classes turned on him…. Consider the situation in which he came to office. The economic machinery of the nation had broken down…. People who had anything to [...]
I’m participating in a discussion of Matt Miller’s new book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, which I’ve gushed about here already, over at the TPMCafe Book Club this week. Here’s my first post: When I was reading through the seven Dead Ideas in Matt’s book, I got most excited about “Your Company Should Take Care [...]
I gave up on trying to understand politics a long time ago (when I was a political reporter at The Birmingham News and was constantly getting scooped by rivals who had a far better sense than I of what was political dynamite in Alabama and what was not). So I found Jay Newton-Small’s explanation of [...]
Matthew Yglesias wonders if the ferocity of Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz‘s criticisms of the Geithner plan can be explained by the apparent fact they haven’t been briefed/consulted by the Obama administration. I dunno, I sort of get the feeling that Paul and Joe prefer not being briefed, because being briefed means to a certain [...]
Late in the House Financial Services Committee hearing today with Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and Bill Dudley, California Democrat Joe Baca asked Bernanke an interesting question: When did the financial system break? What year did everything go bad? Bernanke demurred, but I have an answer: 2003, or maybe 2004. It was late in 2003 that [...]
