A company finds a market for its “Smart Sponges”, chemically-engineered filters that effectively — and cheaply — purify storm-water runoff
Chapter 11 bankruptcy is one of the greatest glories of American capitalism. It evolved organically during the financial crises of the late 1880s, was replaced with a more punitive code in the 1930s, and then was resurrected and codified in the late 1970s. Chapter 11 allows companies that got in over their heads to seek [...]
Lynda Resnick, who with her husband Stewart owns Fiji water (along with POM and Teleflora), is on the board of the Aspen Institute and the Milken Family Foundation and is a regular at conferences where people talk about things like sustainability and carbon footprints. So is her water—pictured above at the Milken Foundation Institute Global [...]
Nouriel Roubini was one of the first people to start talking about this financial crisis and recession and gosh darnit if he’s not going to be one of the last. He popped by this afternoon to talk to some TIME editors and writers. While he was here, he made fun of the notion that we’re [...]
Lew Ranieri, the man who built the market for mortgage securities in the 1980s (and proud member of TIME’s list of 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis), was very early in predicting that subprime mortgage lending was going to result in a really big mess. I first heard of about his gloomy views [...]
The U.S. economy shrank at a 6.1% annual pace (adjusted for inflation/deflation) in the first three months of the year. That’s a lot, especially since it was down 6.3% in the previous quarter. If these numbers hold up (more on that in a moment), that’s the worst half-year run for the economy since 1957-58, when [...]
University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, in the midst of a mostly predictable analysis of the financial crisis and criticism of the Obama stimulus package at lunch at the Milken hoedown today, said a couple of interesting things: 1) Becker has built an estimable career around the notion that individuals generally respond rationally to economic [...]
Today we got a major follow-up to the Obama Administration’s housing-rescue plan. You can now catch a break on your second mortgage, too. I don’t think the story I wrote is online yet, but here’s the sneak-peak: Like the broader “Making Home Affordable” housing plan announced on Feb. 18, the new effort involves the federal [...]
Orin Kramer, the chairman of the board that oversees New Jersey’s public pension system (and himself a hedge fund manager), says he got a call from a reporter a while back asking him whether pension fund managers could ever be expected to “understand hedge funds in the way they do GM or GE.” That got [...]
Jim Surowiecki, riffing on my post from last week on possible reasons for Treasury’s less-than-bold approach to the banking crisis, which was itself a riff on a Ryan Avent riff on a Gary Weiss profile of Tim Geithner (yes, we bloggers are news-gathering dynamoes), writes: It’s true that the administration’s approach may not be bold [...]
