As Hugh McColl built North Carolina National Bank into NCNB into Nationsbank into Bank of America, Ken Lewis was the guy who made all those mergers work. McColl was the swashbuckler, Lewis the beancounter. From a 2005 profile in by Fortune by Shawn Tully: Lewis’s cool restraint impressed McColl. “He always had good credit judgment,” [...]
My colleague Steve Gandel has a nice piece about the strange contortions the FDIC is now going through to avoid tapping its credit line with the U.S. Treasury. He writes: The agency has a credit line with the Treasury to tap as much as $500 billion in emergency capital through the end of next year. [...]
It was a year ago today that the Dow fell 777.68 points in reaction to the House rejecting version 1.0 of the bank bailout plan. That was the biggest point drop ever, although in percentage terms it didn’t even make the top 10. It was also, in retrospect, a reasonable (if a bit sudden) reassessment [...]
I have a story up on Time.com about why I don’t think the $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit should be extended. I was asked to write the story as an opinion piece, which is why it reads like an opinion piece—even though the headline might lead you to believe you’ll be getting some good [...]
One positive byproduct of this real estate/financial crisis has been the elevation of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices to the status of standard measure of housing prices and the relegation of the National Association of Realtors’ average and median sales price numbers to sideshow. This is mostly a good thing, because the NAR numbers are [...]
Rudy Provoost, the CEO of Philips Lighting, was here Friday. There’d been a big, goofy photo of him, lightbulb in hand, in Friday’s NYT business section (the photo does not appear to be online, although the story it accompanied is) so I figured the Curious Capitalist ought to have its own version. Provoost is holding [...]
Sometime today, the G20 will be declared to have supplanted the G8 as the “permanent council for international economic cooperation.” Yay, G20! Having international economic confabs that didn’t include Brazil or India or China no longer made any sense. Then again, having a UN Security Council where France and the UK have veto power and [...]
I’ve got a new column online and in the issue of TIME with the cover story on Detroit. It’s about bonds.
Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil has an uncharacteristically boneheaded column about the FDIC’s money troubles. He begins: The FDIC’s insurance fund is going broke, and Sheila Bair is wondering aloud about how to replenish it. This means one thing for taxpayers: Watch your wallets. I learned about the column from FT Alphaville, which notes that it inspired [...]
I try not to spend too much time paying attention to politicians’ Twitter feeds (or to what politicians say in general… or to Twitter feeds), but this tweet, from Rep. Lee Terry of Nebraska caught my eye: Why is an unemployed person in California more worthy of help than an unemployed person in Nebraska?
