Way back in 1997, I wrote these words in a Fortune article:
General Electric, a company whose name invariably comes up when you ask Wall Streeters about earnings management, says it does what it does because the stock market demands it. “We think consistency of earnings and no surprises is very important for us,” says Dennis Dammerman,
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Noam Scheiber has an interesting if (perhaps inevitably) inconclusive article in The New Republic on “What’s stopping Tim Geithner?” It begins:
In June 2007, Tim Geithner, then the president of the New York Fed, gave a speech about the financial crisis he’d helped defuse as a Clinton Treasury official in the late 1990s. … Geithner
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Proponents of the nationalization of troubled big banking companies like Citigroup generally make the case that the work should be done with dispatch and the banks returned promptly to private hands. But the test case for nationalization, AIG, is demonstrating that it may not be that easy.
When the Federal Reserve effectively took over …
I’ve got a new column online and in the issue of TIME with a fraying rope on the cover. It’s not entirely new—bits of it already appeared in a TIME.com piece I wrote Tuesday—and what I really want to talk about are the other economy-related pieces in the magazine: There’s David von Drehle’s wrenching House of Cards: The Faces Behind …
Richard Katz, who knows a whole lot more about Japan than I do, writes in the new Foreign Affairs that likening our government’s handling of the financial crisis so far to Japan in the 1990s is balderdash:
It took the Bank of Japan nearly nine years to bring the overnight interest rate from its 1991 peak of eight percent down to zero.
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Joel Stein joins the Rick Santelli bandwagon in a column that I think will be in the next issue of TIME but is already online. It’s far more reasoned and charming than the now famous Santelli rant, although I still disagree with the conclusion.
The biggest revelation is that Joel appears to have paid $1.12 million for his house in the …
I’ve got an article on bank nationalization and the like up on TIME.com. My column for the magazine is going to be an outgrowth of it, so any editorial suggestions will be accepted gratefully (if not necessarily followed).
The WSJ is reporting that Treasury is thinking about converting the preferred shares in Citi that cost it $45 billion (and that’s not counting government guarantees of a $301 billion Citi loan pool) into a 25% to 40% share of the company’s common stock. This even though all the common shares of Citi could (in theory, at least) have been …
On Tuesday night, your local PBS station will be airing (probably around 9) a FRONTLINE documentary called Inside the Meltdown that is by all appearances the most in-depth attempt so far to explain our little crisis on video. From the preview clips available for viewing on the site (I’d embed one but WordPress has chosen to make that …
Paul Krugman, glomming on to the Failed Presidency of Barack Obama meme originated earlier this week by the FT’s Martin Wolf, writes in his column today:
So far the Obama administration’s response to the economic crisis is all too reminiscent of Japan in the 1990s: a fiscal expansion large enough to avert the worst, but not enough to
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Barbara and I both participated, not entirely unwillingly, in TIME’s group effort to pick 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis. It was initially conceived as a Web project (at first we were going to try for a list of 75, but that just seemed way too tiring, both for us and for readers), and while it has ended up in the magazine as …
Felix Salmon has a long and rousing defense of Suze Orman against an attack piece by documentary filmmaker James Scurlock:
There are millions of Americans out there who fail to pay their credit card in full each month despite the fact that they have money in the bank to do so. There are tens of millions who have stock-market investments
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