Today’s story in the Wall Street Journal about Goldman Sachs’ shifty dealings with Libya’s sovereign-wealth fund is yet another blow to Goldman’s once-rock solid rap. That begs the question: how much more negative publicity can Goldman’s business take? As Stephen Gandel argued on this blog a few weeks back, they can handle a lot. Sure, [...]
Welcome back to the sour economy. It didn’t take long after the Memorial Day break to get the latest signs that the recovery remains in the gutter. The housing market has been looking like it was headed for a double dip for some time. On Tuesday, we got confirmation that it happened. According to the [...]
The U.S. economy is still only muddling through, according to revised GDP numbers out by the Commerce Department. That’s bad news. But more disturbing is the accompanying dollar slump against the euro, and what it says about perceptions of our economy versus Europe’s. The Commerce Department’s revised report on first quarter GDP showed a dowdy [...]
So far, the G8 is all about getting a Marshall plan for the Arab world, a little juice for Japan, and a dose of sanity for Europe. But what ever happened to that global deal on trade? It’s not like boosting trade isn’t on everyone’s minds. In a letter to the G8, U.S. Secretary of [...]
The HBO docu-drama Too Big To Fail and the book by Adam Ross Sorkin by the same title are billed as the defining history of the financial crisis. But it may be time to rewrite history again. Recently, there has been some griping about financial lobbying because it seems the big banks are attempting to [...]
The title of this post may make some of you suspect that I’m smoking something. How can I think genteel Europe could see public upheaval massive enough to overthrow long-entrenched, democratic regimes, in the way Arab countries have witnessed popular movements upset the political order? Well, maybe the Europeans aren’t ready to storm the Bastille, [...]
The eye-popping IPO for Yandex, a Russian search engine few Americans have ever heard of, which managed to raise $1.3 billion on the NASDAQ, is raising more questions about whether we’re in a new tech bubble. So are we? Probably, but not the kind you might think. Despite the hype, we’re not yet back to [...]
Remember the basket case that was AIG. The giant insurance company became known for everything that was wrong with Wall Street: unchecked risk-taking; complicated, unregulated derivatives; and, most importantly, huge, unearned bonuses.The cover of TIME carried the headline “AIG = WMD.” In order to save the company the government had to pledge $182 billion. Not [...]
For several decades, economists have been dancing around the idea that economic growth doesn’t equal happiness. And yet, politicians and the media are constantly using growth rates as the way to assess whether a country is really getting ahead. Why? Because GDP is one of the few economic indicators that everybody measures and understands. The [...]
There must be a sweet taste of revenge in Motor City these days, what with Chrysler having successfully raised $7.5 billion by selling bonds to Wall Street. Sure, the Fiat-run American automaker had to pay a stiff interest rate, but it did manage to raise money from the same folks who balked at taking a [...]
