Goldman Sachs, in response to the continuing bad press it’s been getting for planning to shower its employees with money, announced today that bonuses for its top 30 managers will be paid out entirely in stock.
Yawn. Bonuses for top management at Goldman were already paid out mostly in stock. Goldman already used clawbacks to make sure …
I wouldn’t put toooo much stock in such forecasts at this early stage (and GDP growth matters a lot less to most of us than, say, whether we’ve got jobs). But in the wake of several surprisingly positive data releases this week, some Wall Street economists are revising their forecasts of fourth-quarter growth upwards. A few examples from …
The House of Representatives just voted 223-202 to approve the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009. The Senate still has to approve its own financial reform plan, and once that happens (if it happens), there will be all sorts wrangling and compromising and sneaky inserting of provisions that hardly anybody will …
I’m not going to show the video of the new Orrin Hatch Hanukkah song, because that’s just overexposed. Same goes for Adam Sandler, of course. Neil Diamond’s cover of Adam Sandler less so, but I just dunno. Sarah Silverman’s “Give the Jew Girl Toys” is inappropriate for a family blog. My favorite Hanukkah song is the Barenaked Ladies’ …
The great MIT economist Paul Samuelson died today, at age 94. The NYT, in its obituary, calls him “the foremost academic economist of the 20th century,” which sounds about right. Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis, a reworking of his doctoral dissertation that was first published in 1947, transformed graduate education in …
I’ve got a column online and in the issue of TIME with the Year in Pictures on the cover. It’s about measuring unemployment. In it I cite a Bureau of Labor Statistics study that found that what people said about their interest in getting a job wasn’t all that predictive of whether they’d actually get one down the road. It’s here if you …
So I was out for the past couple of days and missed the big news about Ben Bernanke being named TIME’s Person of the Year. Then again, I had already used my keen deductive abilities to figure out that Bernanke was going to be named TIME’s Person of the Year. I’d known for a while that my colleague Michael Grunwald was working on a …
It’s last year’s Christmas song from the Killers!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW8oEWfuEIg]
I think this is my favorite of the Killers’ annual seasonal tunes (of which there are now four). “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” is pretty brilliant, and this year’s “¡Happy Birthday, Guadalupe!” is growing on me. But they don’t have Elton …
This was the sidewalk in front of the Citibank at 96th and Broadway and New York a little after noon on Sunday. The reason I took a picture of it was because, while most of the sidewalks along Broadway were already salted and shoveled and ready for walking after the big Saturday night snowfall, the sidewalks in front of bank branches …
This just went out on Businesswire. For those who don’t believe in clicking through, it says I’ve got a new job, editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group. I start Jan. 25, and I’ll still be at TIME and writing this blog through Jan. 22. (I’m pretty sure the blogging over the next month will be a lot better than it has been …
The Bureau of Economic Analysis has just released its third try at estimating third-quarter GDP. It’s now been ratcheted down to 2.2%—from 2.8% in the estimate released a month ago and 3.5% in the original estimate. The culprit:
downward revisions to nonresidential fixed investment, to private inventory investment, and to personal
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A lot of people think the problem with our banks is that they tried to do too much. Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute argues the opposite:
as banks have been forced out of lending to public companies–which in themselves offer significant diversification–they have focused more and more of their resources on fewer and
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