I liked John Gapper’s FT profile of CNBC’s “pugnacious pundit” Charlie Gasparino. A typical passage (with the curse words bleeped, because Curious Capitalist readers require more protection from profanity than FT readers do):
If anything, the onscreen Gasparino is a toned-down version of the off-air one. One morning, he upset Lance
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Tyler Cowen writes, in response to a Felix Salmon dismissal of financial innovation as “net, net … a bad thing,”
I can understand that particular financial innovations might be bad, but financial innovation overall? Surely this claim was false in years 1200, 1900, and also 1950. (Of course you’ll find very harmful financial
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A reader in Kansas City writes:
If income tax rate increases plus surcharges combine to push the effective rate for “the rich” up past 40 percent, won’t we likely see a dramatic DROP in the income of the top one percent? Presumably many of the business owners who now treat their corporate earnings as personal income through LLCs
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The headline number from Citigroup’s second-quarter earnings release—$4.3 billion—is pretty staggering. Goldman Sachs only made $3.4 billion; JP Morgan Chase $2.7 billion. And those are the well-managed banks.
Then you read to the second line of the earnings release and see that Citi booked a gain of $6.7 billion, after taxes, …
The consumer price index jumped 0.7% (seasonally adjusted) in June, the biggest monthly rise since last summer. Most of the gain came from rising gasoline prices: the CPI excluding food energy (what they call core inflation) was up only 0.2%. And prices overall are still down 1.4% from a year ago. This ain’t no inflationary spiral. But …
When I saw the headline on my RSS reader it brought back all sorts of tech-bubble memories: F-Secure Pays €27.5 Million For French Storage Startup Steek, it read. Continued the TechCrunch Europe post:
Finnish computer security provider F-Secure has acquired venture-backed French startup Steek for €27.5M in cash with the possibility
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Thanks to the persistence and assistance of commenter audiospaceship, I finally read the samizdat version of Matt Taibbi’s Goldman Sachs screed. (Rolling Stone only posted excerpts, and while I may still go out and buy a print copy, I wouldn’t be able to link to it.) I generally liked it, and I actually learned a bunch from the section …
Ezra Klein writes, regarding Sarah Palin’s cap-and-trade op-ed in today’s Washington Post, that its failure to mention “global warming” or “climate change” makes it “a bit like an op-ed that attacks firefighters for pointing pressurized water cannon(s) at everything but never mentions fires.” I’m not absolutely sure the analogy is fair, …
Goldman Sachs reported earnings this morning, and it reported lots of them—$3.44 billion in the quarter ending June 26. That’s well more than the $2.33 billion Goldman’s made in the comparable quarter in 2007, back before the world started falling apart. In other words, Goldman may be emerging from this crisis in a better position than …
Stan Collender writes a rousing defense of the Washington Post plan—since abandoned in the face of criticism/controversy—to charge for access to “intimate dinners” at publisher Katharine Weymouth’s house:
The only thing the Washington Post really did that was wrong is that it apologized.
Other news outlets have been doing things
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I read most of The Hobbit last night. I’d been reading it in very small chunks to Curious Capitalist Jr. over the past few months. He’s perfectly capable of reading it himself, but didn’t seem to want to, so I started reading it to him. Yesterday we dropped CC Jr. off at summer camp, so I figured I’d read ahead in the book—which I read …
