I started writing this blog in Sept. 2006 at Fortune.com (a wholly owned subsidiary of CNNMoney.com). The very first post was about boards of directors. Law professor Stephen Bainbridge thought it was stupid. I said no it wasn’t, and my blogging career was off. At the time it was still not all that common for [...]
My column this week is about economic data, and the ways in which it can mislead (or at least send us into unnecessary tizzies). It was inspired by a stint of economic-indicator-watching during Christmas week. A GDP report came out that revised third quarter economic growth down to a 2.2% annual pace—from the 3.8% originally [...]
After a year of seemingly shouting in the wilderness, Paul Volcker finally got his druthers this morning. The Obama administration is going to push for a breakup of modern Wall Street. Or at least a bunch of restrictions to wall off risky, profitable stuff from the nuts and bolts that keep the financial system going. [...]
I’m not just finding junk as I clean out my timemagazine.com inbox. I also come across interesting stuff, like this long-ago e-mail from reader Darrell Balmer: In Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller highlighted the increased probability of high equity returns over a ten year period when the price to average preceding 10 year earnings is low. [...]
I’m cleaning out my timemagazine.com e-mail inbox one last time. One thing that this exercise is driving home to me is that, after more than 13 years at effectively the same e-mail address (e-mails addressed to my old fortunemail.com address still land in my inbox), a journalist gets an insane amount of PR spam. And [...]
In honor of the NYT’s big announcement today, today’s repurposed post (from January 2007) is about newspapers: In his paean to Webcomic Achewood the other day, my fellow time.com blogger Lev Grossman mentioned in passing that “I always loved comic strips—that was the sole reason my family ever bought the Boston Globe growing up.” That [...]
It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both. That’s how Conan O’Brien put it in his immortal ‘People of Earth’ missive. You’ve got [...]
Okay, so it’s only Election Day in Massachusetts. But I’d been thinking that, since this is my last week of blogging at the Curious Capitalist, I ought to repurpose some of my favorite old posts. So here’s one from the heat of the 2008 election campaign. It begins: I just can’t wrest myself away from [...]
A reader (well, this Pulitzer-winning genius newspaper columnist of a reader), e-mails after reading my book: From the very beginning of financial capitalism, the goal seems to have been to beat the market, which is to say, anticipate and profit the upside and downside of the market—not the industry or business of the stock traded. [...]
I just did an interview on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that will air on public radio’s Here and Now today a bit after noon Eastern time (or whenever your local station happens to carry it). As I prepared for it, I found myself paying less attention to this week’s hearings than to the transcripts [...]
