Being in the company of outstanding minority journalists at a leadership workshop last week made me realize: I need a mentor.
I’m at that sort of halfway point in my career where I’m often tapped to be a mentor to entry-level journalists, but no one really thinks to offer me the same kind of guidance. My company, in a shockingly …
So they went with 75 basis points (that’s three-quarters of a percentage point to you and me). Big, but slightly less than markets were expecting. Which would seem to mean that Bernanke & Co. are convinced that the economy really is in a recession now, but would prefer not to be seen as entirely doing Wall Street’s bidding. Or something …
Samantha Power makes me acutely aware of my shortcomings.
Unless you travel in certain hifalutin circles, you probably never gave her much thought or notice until this month. She’s a journalist/academic/human-rights activist who is one of the world’s leading thinkers on genocide. She’s one of Barack Obama’s senior foreign policy …
Goldman and Lehman reported better-than-expected results this morning, stock markets opened on a decided upswing, and “the iTraxx Europe, which measures the cost of protecting 125 investment-grade credits against default, fell about 17 basis points to 143bp.” (No I don’t entirely know what that means either, but it sounds good.) Which …
I totally feel for the workers at Bear Stearns. Sure, my annual salary probably equals the lunch budget for the summer interns. And I bet their company cafeteria serves sushi every day—and real sushi, not some b.s. involving avocado and spam.
But to watch your retirement savings go up in smoke—and to realize simultaneously that your …
Paul Krugman writes:
Justin Fox suggests that we learn from the way Sweden dealt with its financial crisis at the beginning of the 90s. I’m looking into it.
What Justin doesn’t mention, however, is that (according to Reinhart and Rogoff [pdf!] ) the resolution of Sweden’s financial crisis imposed a fiscal burden — that is,
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With markets now closed for the day, you’d have to say the Fed’s frantic actions of the weekend–engineering the fire sale of Bear Stearns, cutting the discount rate and creating yet another “lending facility”–were successful. Stock markets didn’t collapse (Dow up slightly, S&P 500 and Nasdaq down), and, much more importantly, credit …
Bear Stearns’s share price went from $145 a year ago to $57 last week to $30 Friday to $3.82 this afternoon. That’s still $1.82 above the $2 a share JP Morgan Chase has offered to buy Bear (hope springs eternal, I guess), but it ain’t much. Now the FT’s Alphaville blog reports that “spurious” rumors are devastating the share price of …
See, I’m not the only one pushing the Swedish solution! From Merrill Lynch North American economist David Rosenberg’s Morning Call Notes today:
The Japanese credit crisis is usually cited as the benchmark for what not to do. But few cite Sweden’s crisis as a template on what might actually work. … the Swedish authorities realized early
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I’m getting a lot of pitches lately from this expert or that, offering to enlighten us (meaning me and thereby you) on recession-proofing your career. A lot of media outlets are taking the bait, judging by the meme wave of articles purporting to tell us such secrets. Which made me wonder: just exactly what does qualify a line of work as …
Today’s looking like the most fraught day yet in the rolling financial crisis of 07-08(-09?). Yeah, U.S. stock prices are up as of 10:50 a.m. But despite the continuing tendency of CNBC (and most of the rest of the financial media) to focus on the Dow and the S&P, they’re not what really matter here. This is a credit crisis, not a stock …
So JP Morgan Chase is buying Bear Stearns, for what everybody’s reporting to be somewhere in the $230-$250 million range.
That’s significantly less than Bear Stearns’ newish headquarters building at 383 Madison Ave.–a few blocks from JP Morgan Chase’s HQ–would fetch. Estimates Bloomberg:
The 1.2 million-square-foot, 45-story structure
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