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
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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.
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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 of the 1912/1913 Pujo hearings …
Remember when the economic crisis taught us the importance of saving some of our money for a rainy day? That’s a lesson the microfinance community is increasingly warming up to, too. I wrote a piece about the shift—emphasizing savings, not just lending—last summer, but I’m mentioning it again today because the Gates Foundation has …
It’s day one of the Phil hearings (because, after the Pujo hearings and the Pecora hearings it has to start with a P). I tuned in just as commission chairman Phil Angelides was starting to question Lloyd Blankfein, and I generally liked their back and forth. Angelides is a Sacramento real estate developer turned Democratic politician who …
In a cryptic little response to my post last week on Chicago economics, the estimable Reiham Salam writes:
Justin Fox doesn’t mention Frank Knight or Jacob Viner in this post. He also suggests that John Cochrane has nothing interesting to say.
This hit a nerve. I did consider discussing the pre-1950s Chicago economics tradition …
Are we heading for a boom time? A slow slog? Another recession? A ’90s-Japan-like lost decade? A full-on depression? The experts have weighed in, as they’re apt to do.
I’ve already shared Sam Savage’s take on the failure to keep the underpants bomber from getting on that plane to Detroit: that it’s just really really really hard to identify a vanishingly small segment of the population and keep them off airplanes without mistakenly preventing scads of harmless people from boarding. But there are other …
Dennis Santiago of Institutional Risk Analytics reports that in the first seven days of the joint IRA/Huffington Post/Roosevelt Institute Move Your Money campaign, about 340,000 people searched 16,631 zip codes to find community banks in their neighborhoods that are rated healthy by IRA. Well, maybe not 340,000 people—340,000 searches. …
Whoops, sorry. I got so caught up in a must-write-column trance today that I forgot to blog. I did briefly consider saying something about John Cassidy’s edifying and entertaining New Yorker piece on Chicago School economics, which I read while eating breakfast and making Curious Capitalist Jr.’s lunch this morning. But when I looked it …
Barry Ritholtz has a good summing-up of a new paper (pdf) by three IMF economists on the link between lobbying and risk-taking by lenders. The gist: Firms that made the riskiest loans spend the most on lobbying Congress. And what were their lobbying aims?
• prevent any tightening of lending laws that reduce the benefits of
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After being urging to do so by several readers, I finally read Ron Paul’s End the Fed. I was about to buy it for the Kindle I got for Christmas, but when I got to work Monday morning there was a package in my mailbox from Gary Howard at Paul’s Campaign for Liberty with two copies of the book. I gave one to my colleague Stephen Gandel, …
