Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s wildly over-the-top response to Joe Nocera’s critical column in last Saturday’s NYT (Felix has an excellent summary of the back and forth) got me thinking about the strange workings of the minds of the lavishly compensated. Ackman’s tone reminded me a lot of the air of aggrievement that pervades his …
German Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to have rocked the global financial boat with her intimation yesterday that central banks—with the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England leading the way—were overdoing it with their buy-every-asset-they-can-find approach to fighting the financial crisis. From the FT:
“What other central banks
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I recently devoted a column to Peter Schiff, whom I first discussed in a piece headlined “The Armageddon Gang” in March 2007. Another member of the gang, Michael Panzner—whose 2007 book Financial Armageddon gave the group its name—recently came out with a new book titled When Giants Fall: An Economic Roadmap for the End of the …
From a four-year-old profile of string theorist Michio Kaku that is now for some reason the hottest story at guardian.co.uk:
“String theory predicts the universe is like a soap bubble that is expanding and dying,” he says. Billions of years from now stars will blink out; the night sky will be dark and the oceans will freeze over. But we
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I went down to Princeton this morning to speak to the Class of ’44, which counts frequent Curious Capitalist commenter dadfox among its members. The class is back for its 65th reunion, and it’s back in force, with hundreds of spouses and widows and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren along for the ride. It is a remarkable …
Are corporate America and China headed toward a painful breakup? That’s what this week’s column is about.
I went to a strange event at Bloomberg world headquarters this evening. First came drinks and hors d’oeuvres. (I sort of cut in front of Wendi Murdoch in the drinks line, but she didn’t get hostile or anything.) Then came a panel discussion featuring Joe Stiglitz, Meredith Whitney, Jack Welch, Oliver Sarkozy (Carlyle Group financial …
Here’s a chat I did with Peter Schiff in conjunction with last week’s column.
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Schiff’s younger brother and PR guy Andrew reports that since my column, which laments non-mainstream Peter’s disappearance from the mainstream airwaves, he’s started getting bookings again. It looks like he’s even …
Felix Salmon asked me and the FT’s Alan Beattie, because we’ve both just written “heavyweight new books of economic history” (Beattie’s is False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World. I just now read the first four pages, and they’re great), a few questions:
Can studying history prevent us from repeating past mistakes, or
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Time Warner to Spin Off AOL, CNet News, May 28, 2009
AOL+TWX=??? Do the math, and you might wonder if this company’s long-term annual return to investors can beat a Treasury bond’s, Carol J. Loomis, Fortune, Feb. 7, 2000
GM Said to Plan for June 1 Bankruptcy, Sale of Assets, Bloomberg, May 28, 2009
The Tragedy of General Motors: The …
S&P’s warning on the U.K. government’s credit rating, plus yesterday’s bad day for U.S. Treasuries, has got ten me (and other people) thinking about where we might be headed here in the U.S. The worst case scenario is that of Iceland, where the currency collapses, all the banks fail, and the populace is suddenly 65% poorer relative to …
Steve Coll writes from Stuttgart that he’s seen what deglobalization looks like—Daimler signs with the Chrysler whited out. Then he reminisces:
Ah, Chrysler. I remember when Daimler took it over, in 1999. Its new German C.E.O., Juregen Schrempp, visited the Washington Post to explain himself. He was tall, confident, and evangelical. He
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