Last week’s issue of TIME contained a brief endorsement of a Belgian hit song—singer-songwriter Milow’s acoustic cover of 50 Cent’s “Ayo Technology.” (It really is pretty good.) Which seems reason enough to restart this blog’s Low Countries Music Marathon with this Belgian hit of a few years back: The singer, Gabriel Rios, is Puerto Rican, [...]
I’ve had my final say in my CBS Moneywatch “blog war” with Eric Falkenstein over efficient markets. It really hasn’t been much of a war: We both agree that financial markets go nuts sometimes. He’s just a lot more distrustful of government than I am. Oh, and some Krugman guy has written a review of [...]
Here they finally are. The monthly charts!
So AIG made a $1.82 billion profit in the second-quarter—its first venture out of the red since 2007. Hmmm, it’ll only take 47 more quarters like that for the company to repay the $87.6 billion in direct aid it’s gotten from the federal government. I’m no insurance industry analyst, but a brief look at the [...]
For the social-entrepreneur CEO of Belu, pursuing a purpose might be easier if he pursues a profit too
The FT reports on new research showing that female directors damage corporate profits. Sexy headline. I dug up the study itself to try to resolve the fact that other research has shown the exact opposite (as the piece in the FT points out). Here are the main conclusions of the research, by Renee Adams of [...]
Today’s monthly employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was surprisingly positive. Meaning only that it was less negative than most people expected it would be. Nonfarm employment, the number worth paying the most attention to, was down 247,000 in July—compared with 395,000 in June and an average of 645,000 during the dark months [...]
I just checked out a copy of Chris Welles’s 1975 classic, The Last Days of the Club, from my favorite library. It’s the story of the unraveling in the early 1970s of the New York Stock Exchange’s virtual monopoly on stock trading. Wrote Welles of the NYSE’s member firms (“the Club”): Through one of the [...]
When I learned last night (via a Tweet from Greg Mitchell—yeah, Twitter still worked back then), that Budd Schulberg had died, I immediately pulled down from the shelf a copy of What Makes Sammy Run?, the book that made Schulberg famous (back before On the Waterfront made him immortal). I bought it at a thrift [...]
Jenny Anderson has a very entertaining piece in today’s New York Times (that I’m kind of amazed didn’t make page 1) about business-as-usual returning at Goldman Sachs: “We did not have a near-death experience,” said Gary D. Cohn, Goldman’s president. The government saved the financial industry as a whole, but it did not save Goldman [...]
