I know, I know, I really should be blogging about something other than my stinkin’ book reviews. But this is just too much to keep to myself. From the new Publishers Weekly (nine reviews down), a starred review that begins:
At the core of the current financial crisis has been the widely held assumption that markets behave rationally.
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Thanks to Ezra Klein’s brand new blog at washingtonpost.com, I just discovered a 10-day-old post by Jim Surowiecki that puts some meat on the bones of an argument that’s been bouncing around my head for a while. We’ve all heard lots and lots about how zombie banks supposedly doomed Japan to a lost decade of semi-depression, which means …
My post from a few weeks back featuring video of one Elske de Wall singing Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” in Frisian has been getting a steady stream of traffic lately thanks to Theresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden—inspiring me to share some more Netherlandish music. This time it’s Dutch supergroup The Nits (I’ve been a …
So my book has just gotten its first real review, in Library Journal (you have to scroll down through six other reviews to get to it.) It’s by Robbie Allen of St. Johns River Community College in Palatka, Fla., and it’s pretty positive. But then you get to the final sentence:
The style here is journalistic, with personal stories that
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My column for this week is online. Except it’s not really my column—it’s a part of the cover package on The Future of Work. I’d written it as a my regular one-page column, then was informed at the last minute that I needed to cut it by 20% and add a couple of sentences about, you know, the future of work. (If I worked for Dow Jones, by …
This was just forwarded to me by former Curious Capitalist guest blogger Mark Gimein:
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — An economist on leave from the federal agency that insures bank deposits has been charged with the April 11 attempted robbery of a Kansas City-area bank.
Jeff Walser said he had a bomb in his briefcase and demanded money at the
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I tend to get around to listening to podcasts long after they were recorded (other than the all-important Deutsche Welle Nachrichten podcasts, which have the advantage of being only 5 minutes long), so it was only on this morning’s subway ride to work that I got to last week’s semi-notorious Planet Money shouting match between Harvard …
I’ve written yet another in my continuing series of TIME.com pieces explaining that just because the economy is no longer falling off a cliff doesn’t mean it’s about to start booming. This time it’s about consumer spending and the pokey trajectory it’s likely to follow going forward, meaning that other sectors of the economy will have to …
I just got these. The first honest-to-goodness copies of my book. Barack Obama, Jack Bogle and Clarence Seedorf are all very excited and I am too. As my publicity campaign gears up (the official publication date is June 9), I’m going to try not to plug the book too mercilessly on this blog—which is after all the property of Time Inc. …
The FT hosted a breakfast this morning where Gillian Tett promoted her new book about derivatives and the financial crisis, Fool’s Gold. There was a great moment during the Q&A when NYT columnist Joe Nocera started off, “There’s this character in your book, Mark Brickell …”
“He’s sitting behind you,” Tett interrupted. At which point …
The Washington Post has a fascinating tale today of student-loan behemoth Sallie Mae throwing in the towel—and abandoning its long-time frenemies in the banking industry—by more or less endorsing the Obama administration’s plan to put student lending in the hands of government. Sallie Mae’s tweak to the administration plan involves …
Right before the stock market bottomed out on March 9, I wrote a column (headlined “Call Me Mr. Sunshine”) outlining five reasons for moderate optimism on the economy. I didn’t make any kind of market call (unlike Doug Kass), but clearly I was on to something: Everybody had gotten so pessimistic that it was almost inevitable that they …
