Congressman Barney Frank reports that after closed-door meetings with bank executives, regulators and central bankers, everyone understands that reforms are coming, and that while those reforms will be internationally coordinated, they won’t be identical from country to country. International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn says the only way world economies will see a double-dip recession is [...]
Former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson is sitting down with Time for an interview, and we need to know what to ask him. If you click on this link here, you can submit a question. The print interview will appear in the magazine (in the “10 Questions” slot up front), and a video of the interview [...]
I just went to a panel discussion about Internet security and let me tell you, it was scar-y. Between individual fraud, organized crime, corporate espionage and government spying, it’s an incredibly dangerous world out there, which, according to one panelist, is growing exponentially worse. These are incredibly complex problems that even the smartest of the [...]
Obama economic adviser Larry Summers cautions that the U.S. economy still has a long way to go before it’s fully back to normal, even though fourth quarter annualized growth came in at 5.7%. Computer mogul Bill Gates promises $10 billion for vaccine research and delivery over the next decade, double what his foundation spent on [...]
The buzz in the halls here at Davos continues to be about financial regulation. Yesterday the world’s largest banks had a closed-door strategy session, and tomorrow they’re meeting with regulators and policy makers, including U.S. Congressman Barney Frank. This afternoon Deutsche Bank CEO Joseph Ackermann gave an update on what the financial services folks are [...]
America’s economy galloped ahead in the final quarter of 2009, expanding at a better-than-expected 5.7% rate, according to the first estimate from the Commerce Department. (I hasten to add that it was not a surprise to CC founding contributor Justin Fox who’s been alerting readers to the strong likelihood of an eye-popping 4th quarter performance.) [...]
Bill Clinton pops by to encourage continued support of Haiti and says the nation could emerge with an economy stronger than it had before. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou denies that his country is looking for emergency funding to finance its budget deficit. The heads of Bank of America, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Barclays and HSBC hold [...]
President Obama handled his first State of the Union pretty well on Wednesday evening. But overhanging his ambitious agenda is a darkening cloud of debt as we were reminded Thursday when the senate voted to raise the nation’s debt limit by $1.9 trillion. The CBO director recently noted that debt held by the public totaled [...]
This is not official Davos business, but I want to quickly weigh in on the State of the Union. I’ve written before about how it’s tough for the federal government to explicitly set out to create jobs. Nonetheless, the President’s speech from last night had some decent ideas. Plus one really bad one. Good idea [...]
A lot of the talk here at Davos is, unsurprisingly, about financial regulation. At TIME’s Board of Economists yesterday morning, David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group had a nice take on why we probably shouldn’t hold our breath for a bunch of nations getting together to pass the same laws in order to prevent regulatory [...]
