Because some guys from Wall Street are getting together…
Here’s what we know so far (from the WSJ):
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York held an emergency meeting Friday night with top Wall Street executives to discuss the future of venerable firm Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the parlous state of U.S. financial markets.
The
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While Justin has been hard at work writing a story about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I’ve been spending some time revisiting the law Congress passed in July that let Treasury do what it did over the weekend.
There was a whole lot of other stuff in there, if you remember back, including billions of dollars in federal funding that will …
Remember last year when Richard Branson tried to take over the failing British bank Northern Rock? That wasn’t a non sequitur. The famously daredevilish head of Virgin Group is really into financial services right now. We had a chance to talk about it while he was in town to announce his latest adventure: attempting to break the record …
This morning’s New York Times has a story about the “$250 billion war chest” amassed to finance a “tidal wave of infrastructure projects in the United States and overseas.” Big banks and funds want to buy your roads, bridges and airports, America—and since Congress won’t put on its big-boy pants and pay for infrastructure improvements, …
Journalists who write about the housing meltdown occasionally get taken to task for not laying enough blame at the feet of the individual homeowners who were signing up for mortgages they should have known they couldn’t afford. I, myself, have been accused of this. So in the interest of blaming homeowners their fair share, let me present …
In response to my post yesterday about why it’s a bad idea for schools to pay kids to get good grades, a commenter named yeah man raised a great point. He wrote:
If the social norms in place were working there would have been no need for this program in the first place.
This morning I was reading the October issue of the Journal of …
I have a piece in this week’s magazine (Obama on the cover). It starts:
Stuart Katz and Jeff Kovack met at Ohio State. They quickly hit it off. The pair joined the same fraternity, and after graduation, both moved to Baltimore, where they became roommates. Then a year ago in April, the 25-year-olds took the next step: they bought a
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I cringed this morning when I read the piece in the Wall Street Journal about schools paying students to get good grades. The writer points out that such programs have had mixed results, and hangs his story on a new study of a 12-year-old Texas program. He writes:
In Texas, high-school students enrolled in Advanced Placement classes who
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Some folks from the Port of Long Beach stopped by this afternoon as part of an East Coast PR kick. They threw some pretty interesting stats my way, including this one: over a 24-hour period, a single cargo ship sitting at Long Beach with its engines running throws off more emissions than all the passenger car traffic in the Los Angeles …
Like most run-of-the-mill consumers, I did a little jig this morning when I read that the FTC would be banning prerecorded sales calls. I don’t care if advances in call-center telephony boost American productivity, picking up the receiver and being confronted with a prerecorded message is annoying.
Sure, there are exceptions, the same …
That’s one of the findings in a new piece of research out from the U.S. Census. The headline news from Fertility of American Women: 2006 is that 20% of women aged 40 to 44 have no children, twice the level of 30 years ago.
But what was really surprising to me was that of the women still having kids, those in the Midwest are more likely …
It must be some sort of indication of where we are in the economic cycle when major publications start doing big stories on the people who make the most pessimistic predictions. Anyone read the “Dr. Doom” profile of NYU economist Nouriel Roubini in the New York Times magazine over the weekend? It reminded me of Fortune‘s recent cover on …
