What were you doing in 1989? I was completing my first year at college and about to turn 18. I had a huge perm and an acid-washed jean jacket. I daydreamed of ways to turn cheerleading into a career. I was a dumb-ass. But I hadn’t been born yesterday.
In 1989, today’s freshman had been born yesterday. The class of 2011 was born the year …
So Congress may actually take on the big tax break, if you want to call it that, enjoyed by investment partnerships like private equity, venture capital and hedge funds. According to today’s NYT:
At the heart of the newest proposal is an attempt to bar private equity and hedge fund operators from a longstanding, but little understood,
…
Back in March, when the whole subprime mortgage mess was beginning to hit the headlines, derivatives consultant Janet Tavokoli said something that both interested and alarmed me. Some of the big Wall Street firms appeared to have started betting against the subprime market at the beginning of the year and successfully protected …
Carol Zurcher, CPA, of Winter Park, Fla., sent me a nice e-mail about my column on the strengths of the Dutch pension system, which has generated a spectacular lack of interest from Curious Capitalist readers. Here’s what she had to say:
Thank you for your article “Where Retirement Works.” A large part of my practice is in designing,
…
Ever since that day in the late 1950s when entrepreneur Charles Lazarus named his second store Toys “Я” Us (the first, which specialized in kids’ furniture, was called Children’s Bargain Town), those who wrote about him struggled with that backwards R. You just couldn’t reproduce it in most newspapers and magazines, and in fact the …
Are you in love with your Work Self? Do you fly from crisis to crisis, stop client bullets with your teeth, hoist massive accounts with one finger? Do colleagues speak to you with respect, laugh at your jokes, let you win–I mean, lose to your superior game at golf?
And then you get home, and does anyone praise you for mastering the …
Here’s part of a comment, from Curious Capitalist regular Yagdyu, that deserves wider distribution:
Most bloggers and blog commentors are either rich people or are friends and family to rich people. Our access to millions and millions of dollars allow[s] us to waste time on the internet giving baseless opinions on issues that affect less
…
In May 2003, Nicholas Carr published an article in the Harvard Business Review called “IT Doesn’t Matter” that launched his glorious career as a technology pundit and made a lot of people in Silicon Valley really angry.
Carr’s argument was that for most big companies, information technology had become a simple necessity, not a source of …
A couple of weeks ago, when I wrote a post about Facebook and LinkedIn, Paul Lukasiak commented:
These social networking sites are kinda scary to me…
In real life, people move on, make new friends, forget old acquaintences, etc, etc, etc…
Now, for the rest of your life, you will be stuck with that guy you thought was pretty cool
…
Art Zadrozny of West Chester, PA, writes in response to my column on ExxonMobil’s stinginess:
Did you not read your own words in the article about Exxon’s approach to oil exploration? Why would the company want to put itself in the same situation it found in 1981 – investing heavily in development, only to see the market bottom out and
…
Studies show that one of the only proven ways to increase the hiring and retention of minorities and women in the workplace is to impose quotas. “Quota” is one of those words that make business leaders cringe. I know because I dropped the Q bomb at a luncheon with Time Warner’s COO, Jeff Bewkes, who roundly rejected such a measure at our …
After a long tenure as the most interesting (if not always the most accurate) of Wall Street’s economic forecasters, Steve Roach started work Monday as Morgan Stanley’s Asia chairman. So it was a little weird to encounter him late in the afternoon in Grand Central Station, rushing for a train. Apparently he doesn’t move to Hong Kong …
