While the econoscribes of the U.S. (me included) were writing Thursday about what the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets had to say about the current financial crisis, a guy who may know more about dealing with financial disaster than anybody in Washington was giving a speech on “kriser i det finansiella systemet” to the …
What power means
The word “power” is ringing in my ears tonight, perhaps because I just wrapped up a 14-hour day spent cogitating on the topic.
Ron Brown, diversity consultant to corporate powerhouses like McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble and General Electric, picked the word apart letter by letter over the course of the day at the leadership training …
Paulson & Co. start closing the barn door
I’ve been reading the 21-page Policy Statement on Financial Market Developments of the Hank-Paulson-led President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. It’s got a lot of acronyms in it. It’s also five years late and a few trillion dollars short, but that’s almost always the case with financial regulation. We’re very good at designing …
George Bush on how tax cuts have saved us all from economic disaster
Commenter smedley and Swamplander Karen Tumulty have asked me to take a look at President Bush’s speech yesterday to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, especially his comments about tax cuts. Here they are:
I remember meeting with some right after the attacks and we were wondering whether or not our economy could withstand a
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So did Steve Schwarzman make $5 billion last year or $351 million? Actually, it was closer to $1 billion
Yesterday afternoon the news was that Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman got $5 billion in compensation last year. But now AP is running the following correction:
In an earlier version of this story, the Associated Press erroneously reported that Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman’s total compensation for 2007 was $5.13 billion.
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Don’t put hookers on your corporate card
The Eliot Spitzer debacle reminds me of a tale from my first job.
That first job was as a cub reporter at Adweek. It was about as insane a workplace as you could dream up, peopled by crusty hacks, artists making the rent and wide-eyed young things trying to learn the trade. We worked in a vast, drafty newsroom crowded with A-Tek …
What makes teams work?
It turns out I’m not a team player.
So I’m out in San Francisco attending a leadership training program for minority journalists. Why, you ask? Yes. I ask that, too. I’m not a leader—at least by title, in that I’m not a manager. I have no plans to become a manager. I need to be the boss of someone like I need a bullet in my …
Yeah, journalism has gotten so frivolous. Not like back in the serious old days
This 1981 beauty is part of a feature on the “Worst TIME Covers” on Time.com. But seriously, what do you think? Love ’em or hate ’em?
Update: An alert reader points out that one of the reporters on the cat cover story was, get this, Maureen Dowd.
Clyde Prestowitz is now a blogger, and a globe-trotting one at that
Trade warrior turned globalizationeer Clyde Prestowitz was just in my office this morning, telling about his travels. He had a nice story about being in Doha over the weekend, reading the Gulf Times, and finding that almost every story had something to do with the decline of the dollar. It was only later that he informed me that he’s …
Should reporters be slammed for technique?
There’s a brouhaha brewing on the left coast over a keynote Q&A conducted by BusinessWeek reporter Sarah Lacy. The thoughts, plans and opinions of her subject, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, was of great interest to the attendees of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival held in Austin, Texas, this week. But, as Wired reports:
They
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Sarah Lacy, Mark Zuckerberg and the Most Important Story in the Whole World
I’m afraid that I’ve let distractions like Emperor’s Club Client 9 and the Fed’s new Term Securities Lending Facility keep me from writing until now about the Most Important Story in the Whole World–journalist Sarah Lacy‘s troubled Q&A with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at the SXSW Interactive Conference Sunday.
It started with a bunch of …
The Fed offers to buy some dodgy mortgage loans, and markets rejoice
When the Federal Reserve announces that it’s going to lower interest rates, most of of us think we have some idea of what that means. When it announces, as it did this morning, a $200 billion “expansion of its securities lending program,” the meaning is a lot muddier–although Wall Street certainly took it as a big positive.
In both …