Reports the Washington Post: The Obama administration is actively discussing the creation of a regulatory commission that would have broad authority to protect consumers who use financial products as varied as mortgages, credit cards and mutual funds, according to several sources familiar with the matter. Hmmm, this sounds awfully familiar. Proposed one Elizabeth Warren two [...]
There has been some chatter, nicely summed up on the cover of today’s New York Times, that if Congress legislates new regulations for credit-card companies (the Senate is due to vote on a bill today), conscientious customers who pay their balances off every month will suffer. The idea is that if we deny card companies [...]
Wondering what will drive the U.S. economy forward in the coming years? I just got an e-mail from a PR guy for the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds that suggests an answer: If you’re looking for a different angle to highlight involving America’s private campgrounds, you may want to focus on their increasing [...]
Here’s the video version of my column on trying to make management into more of a profession: Update: No it’s not here. I can’t get it to embed. But you can watch it on the TIME.com video page.
I’ve got an essay up on CNNMoney.com, which will eventually find its way into the paper pages of Fortune. It begins: There was a time (the 1990s, to be precise) when the concept of shareholder value made a bit of sense: Corporations focused on keeping shareholders happy, and their stock prices rose through the roof. [...]
I know, I know, I really should be blogging about something other than my stinkin’ book reviews. But this is just too much to keep to myself. From the new Publishers Weekly (nine reviews down), a starred review that begins: At the core of the current financial crisis has been the widely held assumption that [...]
Thanks to Ezra Klein’s brand new blog at washingtonpost.com, I just discovered a 10-day-old post by Jim Surowiecki that puts some meat on the bones of an argument that’s been bouncing around my head for a while. We’ve all heard lots and lots about how zombie banks supposedly doomed Japan to a lost decade of [...]
My post from a few weeks back featuring video of one Elske de Wall singing Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” in Frisian has been getting a steady stream of traffic lately thanks to Theresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden—inspiring me to share some more Netherlandish music. This time it’s Dutch supergroup The [...]
So my book has just gotten its first real review, in Library Journal (you have to scroll down through six other reviews to get to it.) It’s by Robbie Allen of St. Johns River Community College in Palatka, Fla., and it’s pretty positive. But then you get to the final sentence: The style here is [...]
Having taken some heat for daring to say that consumers are partly responsible for their own credit-card debt, I find it particularly interesting to see that I’m not the only one. We are currently running an entirely unscientific poll on Time.com, asking people: Which is more to blame for Americans’ credit-card problems—card issuers or cardholders? [...]
