This morning’s inflation report–CPI down 0.1%, core CPI up just 0.2%–supports the case that maybe the Fed’s big rate cut yesterday was less a Wall Street bailout than plain old-fashioned monetary policy. One month of data isn’t what you could call conclusive evidence and it’s hard to look at the rising price of oil and the declining …
In the most breathlessly anticipated move of Ben Bernanke’s young career as Fed chairman, the Federal Open Market Committee just announced that it’s cutting the Federal funds target rate by half a percentage point, to 4.75%.
What does that mean? It means that the traders at the Fed’s open market desk in New York will start buying up …
Rakesh Khurana, the young Harvard Business School professor who made a splash five years ago with his book Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs, is back. This time, in an interesting choice for a guy who doesn’t have tenure yet, he is taking on his employer (and its ilk) with From Higher Aims to …
I had breakfast Friday morning with Lena Komileva, the Group G7 Economist at Tullett Prebon. To get all Lunch With the FT about it, it was at the London Hotel, I had the scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, and she had an omelet with herbs, which I remember because she pronounced the “h” (she’s English).
Yes, it was a breakfast with …
The Greenspanmania will stop soon, I promise. But this, from an interview Fortune‘s Andy Serwer did with Greenspan, is really interesting:
Q: Now of course people are pointing fingers at you, Chairman Greenspan, in terms of the so-called housing bubble bursting and saying that you’re responsible or partly responsible. Look at what he
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Upon opening my copy of The Age of Turbulence, the first thing I checked was the acknowledgments, to make sure my friend Peter Petre got some credit for, uh, ghostwriting the book. Sure enough:
Peter Petre has been my collaborator in the writing. He taught me the age-old art of narrating in the first person. I had always viewed myself as
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After drinking my morning coffee, I went out to get a copy of the Greenspan book. I was initially flummoxed by the discovery that the Barnes & Noble closest to my office is becoming an Ann Taylor, but then found another B & N on 5th Ave. between 45th and 46th Streets.
The book was not prominently displayed–Bill Clinton’s Giving was …
From Greg Ip’s Q&A with Greenspan on the W$J’s economics blog:
At the Fed you said housing was in a froth, but you avoided calling it a bubble. From the vantage point of 2007, can you say now that it was in a bubble? Oh yeah. Lots of froths are equal to a bubble… What was driving prices higher was essentially the aftermath of the
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So it turns out that the quotes that CBS released on Friday were actually the only things approaching news in the big Greenspan 60 Minutes interview Sunday night. Other than getting to see him at RFK with a Nats cap on his head, and learning that he wooed Andrea Mitchell by asking her to read a paper he had written on the Sherman …
This is a bit off topic, but the big news in the world of soccer blogs (and Morrissey blogs) this evening is that English pop melancholist Morrissey was on the sidelines at Thursday night’s Chivas USA-LA Galaxy superclassico (Chivas won 3-0) at the Home Depot Center, wearing a (red and white) Chivas jersey.
It’s decided, then. Major …
The ever-popular young collectivist (and future Spokesperson for the Jews) Ezra Klein writeth:
There was a great line at this morning’s Business and Health Care forum, attributed to Newt Gingrich, which went something like, “one man’s $200 billion in waste is another man’s $200 billion profit stream.” That’s about the most essential fact
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Time‘s infographics czar, Jackson Dykman, put together some very cool charts to accompany the print version of my new article on real estate. But my favorite among his creations was one we didn’t put in the magazine:
In case you’re one to read the fine print, ignore the thing in the chart credit about “rolling 12-month averages.” That …