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, …
Wall Street & Markets
And the Lord Said, Ye Shall Diversify Your Stock Portfolio
Is it wise to look to the Bible for financial advice? Many financial experts say yes (and probably “Amen” as well). By one count, the good book contains 2,300 verses that deal with how to manage your money.
The latest economic indicators: We’re doing better than 5th century Britain!
TIME is “dark” this week—that is, we’ve got no magazine to put out and not many people in the office. But we still have a Website, so I volunteered to pay attention to this week’s economic releases and post on them when they seemed to merit attention. Well, today we’ve got personal spending up 0.5% and personal income up 0.4% in …
Are we overregulating banks or underregulating securities markets?
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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We bailed you out, and you can’t even shovel your $%&*@# sidewalk?!?
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 …
Explaining the Fed
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 …
Paul Samuelson, 1915-2009
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 …
They passed it, they really passed it
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 …
Reading Your Way Through (and Perhaps Out of) Tough Financial Times
Who doesn’t love a good page-turner about economic meltdowns?
Goldman: It’s not the bonuses, it’s the profits
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 …
The banking regulators strike back, sort of
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (previously known as the Basle Committee or the Bâle Committee, which always made me think it had something to do with Ba’al) has been meeting this week and plotting to transform the world of banking regulation. The two big changes that the UN Security Council of banking regulators has in …
The UK bank bonus tax
I’m sure somebody will eventually be able to convince me that this is a bad idea, but my initial reaction to UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling’s temporary 50% bank bonus tax is why the heck not? No, it won’t raise a huge amount of money (an estimated £550 million, which is about $900 million at today’s exchange rate). Yes, …
