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, …
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 …
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 …
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
…
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 …
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 …
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 …
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
…
As you’ve probably heard, the U.S. economy grew at a 1.6% annual, inflation-adjusted crawl in the quarter that ended Sept. 30.
Except that, well, it probably didn’t. It was the “advance” estimate of gross domestic product that the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis released today. On Nov. 29 we’ll get the “preliminary” …
I got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago from Ben Etheridge, a high school senior in Marietta, Georgia, who had come across a 2003 article I wrote on the Bush tax cuts. Ben said the article was “more helpful in trying understand supply side economics than many other sources on the Internet” but that, well, he still didn’t understand …
In my interview with Michael Zielenziger about his new book on Japan, Shutting out the Sun, we discussed the role of such business mavericks as management consultant Kenichi Ohmae, tech mogul Masayoshi Son, and blogger/investor/Gnome Mage Joi Ito. Michael’s take was that they remain marginalized. Joi e-mailed me this morning to say he …
My first visit to Japan came in the sticky late summer of 1998. Fortune had sent me across the Pacific to figure out whether there was any end in sight for the island nation’s long economic nightmare. That’s not really the kind of question you can answer in a week of interviews in a country where you don’t speak the language, but I had …
