Wall Street & Markets

My colleague Stephen Gandel did the hard work of watching the Ken Lewis hearing today on TV, and e-mails this report:

The most important thing we learned from the Ken Lewis hearing today is that the Bank of America CEO has no idea what the definition of the word “threaten” is.

Lewis testified that he was considering backing out of his …

I had this thank you letter in mind that I was going to write to Peter Bernstein. It wasn’t going to be electronic, and it wasn’t going to be just a brief note. The proximate cause was the blurb he wrote for the back cover of my new book, but I meant to thank him more generally for making the book possible. He had given me the idea for …

Zvi Bodie e-mails with an interesting question, related both to my article about long-run investing in the current TIME (in which he plays a starring role) and my book:

If you doubt the rationality of the stock market, then isn’t investing in stocks a crap shoot? How can you be sure that there is a positive risk premium? The historical

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I have a big story in the new TIME (with Steven Johnson’s Tweet Heard Round the World on the cover) about what ever happened to stocks for the long run. A sample:

The notion goes back to 1922, when a bond brokerage in New York City hired Edgar Lawrence Smith to put together a pamphlet explaining why bonds–and certainly not stocks–were

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Evan Newmark has a column in the WSJ making the case that we should start honoring Hank Paulson as a “national hero.” Newmark lists the various improvements in credit markets since Paulson got Congress to approve his Troubled Asset Relief Program last fall, then writes:

All of this is not to suggest that TARP alone made all these good

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Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s wildly over-the-top response to Joe Nocera’s critical column in last Saturday’s NYT (Felix has an excellent summary of the back and forth) got me thinking about the strange workings of the minds of the lavishly compensated. Ackman’s tone reminded me a lot of the air of aggrievement that pervades his …

I went to a strange event at Bloomberg world headquarters this evening. First came drinks and hors d’oeuvres. (I sort of cut in front of Wendi Murdoch in the drinks line, but she didn’t get hostile or anything.) Then came a panel discussion featuring Joe Stiglitz, Meredith Whitney, Jack Welch, Oliver Sarkozy (Carlyle Group financial …

S&P’s warning on the U.K. government’s credit rating, plus yesterday’s bad day for U.S. Treasuries, has got ten me (and other people) thinking about where we might be headed here in the U.S. The worst case scenario is that of Iceland, where the currency collapses, all the banks fail, and the populace is suddenly 65% poorer relative to …

NYU economist (and 2003 Nobelist) Rob Engle has a piece in today’s FT about the area of his expertise, volatility:

An understanding that the fundamental cause of volatility is new information will help assess when it might return to normal. Basically, asset prices change when there is new information, used by analysts and investors, to

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