This just in from the OECD:
The French spend more time sleeping than anyone else in OECD countries. They also devote more time to eating than anyone else and nearly double that of Americans, Canadians or Mexicans. The Japanese sleep nearly an hour less every night than the French and also spend longer at work and commuting than they do
…
I’m sitting in the Phoenix Airport, waiting for the redeye back to NYC. Why was I in Phoenix? To attend the graduation ceremony for the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Why would I do that? Well, they recite something at the Thunderbird graduation that seemed the basis of a good column. We’ll see about that, but for now I have …
Noam Scheiber has a nice explanation of why mortgage cramdowns lost out in the Senate Thursday but safe harbor for mortgage servicers will probably make it into law.
Both provisions are about making it easier to change the terms of troubled mortgages—in particular by reducing the amount owed to reflect the collapse in home values over …
Chapter 11 bankruptcy is one of the greatest glories of American capitalism. It evolved organically during the financial crises of the late 1880s, was replaced with a more punitive code in the 1930s, and then was resurrected and codified in the late 1970s. Chapter 11 allows companies that got in over their heads to seek a way out that …
Lynda Resnick, who with her husband Stewart owns Fiji water (along with POM and Teleflora), is on the board of the Aspen Institute and the Milken Family Foundation and is a regular at conferences where people talk about things like sustainability and carbon footprints. So is her water—pictured above at the Milken Foundation Institute …
Lew Ranieri, the man who built the market for mortgage securities in the 1980s (and proud member of TIME’s list of 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis), was very early in predicting that subprime mortgage lending was going to result in a really big mess. I first heard of about his gloomy views on the subject in 2007, but Michael …
The U.S. economy shrank at a 6.1% annual pace (adjusted for inflation/deflation) in the first three months of the year. That’s a lot, especially since it was down 6.3% in the previous quarter. If these numbers hold up (more on that in a moment), that’s the worst half-year run for the economy since 1957-58, when real gross domestic …
University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, in the midst of a mostly predictable analysis of the financial crisis and criticism of the Obama stimulus package at lunch at the Milken hoedown today, said a couple of interesting things:
1) Becker has built an estimable career around the notion that individuals generally respond rationally …
Orin Kramer, the chairman of the board that oversees New Jersey’s public pension system (and himself a hedge fund manager), says he got a call from a reporter a while back asking him whether pension fund managers could ever be expected to “understand hedge funds in the way they do GM or GE.” That got a little bit of a laugh from the …
Jim Surowiecki, riffing on my post from last week on possible reasons for Treasury’s less-than-bold approach to the banking crisis, which was itself a riff on a Ryan Avent riff on a Gary Weiss profile of Tim Geithner (yes, we bloggers are news-gathering dynamoes), writes:
It’s true that the administration’s approach may not be bold in
…
Scott Minerd, a former big-cheese investment banker at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse who now runs Guggenheim Partners Asset Management, isn’t a big fan of today’s investment banks. He made this clear a couple times this morning at a Milken Instutute Global Conference discussion on Private Versus Publicly Held Financial Institutions: …
I’m sitting in a one-tenth full meeting room at the Beverly Hilton for a 6:30 a.m. panel discussion on Private Versus Publicly Held Financial Institutions: Which Are Best Positioned? More than 300 people had signed up, but maybe the just added session on the swine flu siphoned people away. Or maybe the swine flu siphoned people …
