A video that I posted on the TIME Davos blog:
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Dick Fuld’s $100 house
We knew the housing market was bad, especially in Florida, but you’d still think Dick Fuld would be able to get more than a hundred bucks for a house that cost him and his wife $13.75 million less than five years ago.
On Friday, Cityfile.com, a web site that bills itself as “a guide to the most notable and influential New Yorkers,” …
Non-news from Davos
I’m in Davos this week for the Great Boondoggle in the Alps. I’ll be posting on the TIME Davos blog, but plan to cross-post all my contributions here for those who get these posts via RSS or e-mail (or just can’t be bothered to click over to another blog). So here’s the first one:
The World Economic Forum in Davos is still a couple …
Critiquing Phil Gramm’s explanation of the financial crisis
My previously referenced TIME.com piece on Phil Gramm is here. I wrote it very quickly at the Caribou Coffee just down the street from the American Enterprise Institute, where Gramm spoke. (I shared a table and a power outlet with a young woman who was lining up guests for What’s Going on Around, a show on WILX-TV in Lansing, Mich., …
Breaking News! Phil Gramm still believes in capitalism!
I’ve been down in DC today, mainly to watch Phil Gramm defend himself against the charge that the current financial crisis is all his fault. It was very entertaining. There should be an article about it on TIME.com later this evening, and I’ll probably blog some later too. But right now I’ve got a train to catch, so I’ll leave you with …
So do we want the Chinese to manipulate their currency or not?
The NYT home page currently features this headline:
and this subhead:
Timothy F. Geithner’s comment is certain to anger the Chinese government and raise fears that it could sell off some of its huge reserves of dollars.
If China has been manipulating its currency, it has been doing so by …
Happy times in housing. If you’re looking for a place for rent
I’ve got a new story on Time.com. It begins:
There’s good news in the housing market—for renters. What you pay is on the way down. The average rent in the U.S. fell by 0.4% in the last three months of 2008, according to a survey of large apartment buildings in 79 metro markets by the real estate analytics firm Reis. Even though
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Did John Thain lose his job because he acted like it’s still 2007?
As Wall Streeters go, John Thain had done a pretty impressive job of maintaining his reputation amid the financial carnage of the past couple years. But I’m starting to wonder if any of the Wall Street establishment is going to come out of this mess looking even remotely respectable.
Thain had risen through the ranks at Goldman Sachs. …
New column: Teetering since 1812
My new column is online and in the issue of TIME with some guy flubbing his oath of office on the cover. It begins:
City Bank of New York was founded in 1812 by a group of merchants hoping to fill the void left by the demise of the first Bank of the United States, the sort-of central bank whose charter Congress had allowed to expire the
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This recession is more like the 1980s than the 1930s
In today’s NYT, David Leonhardt digs up some obscure Labor Department statistics to document something I’ve been touching on in this blog: So far, at least, this recession can only be said to be the worst since 1982.
Including discouraged workers … the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent last month. Another 5.2 percent of the labor force
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What did Citi learn from its early-1990s near-death experience? Not enough, apparently
From the prologue to Phillip L. Zweig’s Wriston: Walter Wriston, Citibank, and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremacy (1995):
To bring Citicorp back from the brink in the face of endless criticism, John Reed drew on the capacity for pain he had tapped into as chief of the once-troubled consumer business. As the board mulled
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Will Tim Geithner Be Saved By the Apple Rule?
Tim Geithner’s confirmation hearing will be held Wednesday. The members of the Senate Finance Committee will ask him lots of tough questions about his tax forms and maybe even the financial bailouts he orchestrated as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Some will raise their eyebrows disbelievingly at his answers. A few …