Unlike my friend and fellow CNNMoney blogger Roger Parloff, I don’t spend a lot of time reading legal documents. But I’m still pretty sure that the “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” issued last night by U.S. District Judge Loretta A. Preska (and passed on to me this morning by a friend) in the case of Mastercard (MA) v. FIFA were …
Economy & Policy
Can you make a great business magazine without socialists?
The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, has just relaunched its magazine (formerly known as–get this–“American Enterprise”) as The American.
The editor is James K. Glassman, who will never be able to escape the fact that he co-authored the book Dow 36,000 in 1999 but is otherwise a pretty great …
Still wondering what corporate boards are good for
UCLA law professor and one-man-media-empire-in-the-making Stephen Bainbridge has responded to my response to his critique of my very first post on this blog, “Who needs a board of directors, anyway?” (Dizzy yet?)
Bainbridge’s essay is highly erudite, with footnotes and everything. Reading it will, to quote an ill-fated Fortune ad campaign …
So the stock market is irrational. So what?
Michael Kinsley has a new piece in Slate this week purportedly offering “proof that the stock market is irrational.” As the someday-to-be-author of a book tentatively titled The Myth of the Rational Investor (due out early next year, if I get cracking on the rewrite), I ought to agree with him. But I just can’t bring myself to. Maybe …
Why hits still matter (and will continue to do so)
Mrs. Curious Capitalist and I went to a performance Tuesday night by the Greatest Pop Singer of Our Age, Brazil’s Marisa Monte. It was swell and all, but it was also deeply weird–for the simple reason that I had no idea which songs were her hits.
I think we own every CD by Ms. Monte, a mostly enchanting 39-year-old amalgam of pop diva, …
Milton Friedman: Usually right, and usually victorious
My last conversation with Milton Friedman–who died today at the age of 94–was in October 2005. I was working on an article about monetary policy after the impending retirement of Alan Greenspan and I figured it couldn’t hurt to consult the most important monetary economist of the past half century. (The most important monetary …
Which options sins are committed most?
An expanded version of my post a couple weeks back about “spring-loading” and “bullet-dodging”–options practices that are less obviously illegal than backdating but still smell a little bit like insider trading–is now available in the pages of the Nov. 27 Fortune and online.
One question that I didn’t address in the article, mainly …
No, the U.S. isn’t losing the global talent war
The people at Der Spiegel, the German newsweekly, were nice enough to translate into English a pretty compelling article from last week’s issue. Here’s how it begins:
They are fed up, truly fed up. Fed up with the constant bickering over the costs of wage benefits, social reforms, elimination of subsidies, store closing hours and all the
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The Democrats are going to raise your taxes (in 2011)
During the just-concluded campaign, President Bush and other Republicans did what they could to convince voters that Democrats would raise taxes after the election. Voters didn’t seem to believe them or care, and the soon-to-be leaders of the Democratic House and Senate have been doing their best to emphasize that tax raising isn’t on …
Daniel Ortega and the 1995 Managua rec-league baseball championship
My experience with Daniel Ortega, who looks set to become the next president of Nicaragua, is limited to having watched a couple of baseball games in 1995 on a Managua field adjacent to the gated compound where he was said to live. But even that might be ever-so-slightly instructive about what is to come next.
You may remember that, a …
Dodging bullets, loading springs, and backdating options
Your company is about to report spectacularly good news. You get a big grant of options just before the announcement. Is that a crime?
It depends, I learned Monday at a conference put on in Washington by Stanford Law School’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance. If you’re the CEO, you know about the pending announcement, and you fail …
Tax cuts and their consequences
In a comment to my piece last week on supply-side economics, Dan G. of Milwaukee cast doubt on the forecasts of the Congressional Budget Office: “The CBO can’t make predictions, assumptions, or analysis any better than some far left economics professor shielded from business realities on a college campus,” he wrote. Then he
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