Both Gillian Tett and IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn make the argument in today’s FT that the G-20 leaders are in denial about the toxic assets clogging up the global financial system. (Don’t they mean legacy assets?)
Strauss-Kahn describes the problem:
The US . . . is rightly insisting on stimulus and the EU rightly insisting on
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TIME White House correspondent Michael Scherer, on the scene with all the big cheeses in London, has written a really smart piece on the once yawn-inducing, now possibly all-important issue of global capital-flow imbalances. My contribution? Sneaking a plug for Martin Wolf’s new book into the last paragraph.
I missed this yesterday. From Paul Krugman:
So in 2007 the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation — which stands behind corporate pensions — switched from bonds only to lots of stocks, buying in at, natch, the peak of the market. Oops. And this is big stuff: the Bush administration may have left us all a gratuitous loss of hundreds of
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One of my TIME overlords called me this afternoon to say that he had read James Surowiecki’s thoughtful defense of the Geithner plan in the latest New Yorker and Joe Stiglitz’s thoughtful attack on it in today’s New York Times and the juxtaposition made his head hurt.
Welcome to my world, I more or less said. Regular readers of this …
I spent a reasonably pleasant half hour earlier today taping this week’s edition of On the Line, “The International Public Affairs Talk Show,” which will air starting tomorrow night on your local Voice of America station. (What, you don’t have a local Voice of America station? Try online.) The subject matter was the Chrysler/GM …
Big news from London:
Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.
The move, described as
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The Boston Globe had a story Monday (which is making the rounds today) about the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s decision last year to switch from investing mostly in fixed-income securities to a mix of 45% fixed-income, 45% equities, 5% real estate and 5% private equity. This was the lede:
Just months before the start of last
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Amartya Sen has an essay in the New York Review of Books (thanks for the tip, pneogy) that I really like. First, he neatly dispenses with the notion that we need to ditch or entirely reinvent capitalism:
[D]o we really need some kind of “new capitalism” rather than an economic system that is not monolithic, draws on a variety of
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I’ve been amazed at the tough line the Obama administration has taken on Detroit in the past few days. But David Brooks thinks it’s all show:
[B]y enmeshing the White House so deeply into G.M., Obama has increased the odds that March’s menacing threat will lead to June’s wobbly wiggle-out. The Obama administration and the Democratic
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Simon Johnson’s new Atlantic article The Quiet Coup—about how the crony capitalists of the U.S. financial sector have corrupted our system—has been getting a lot of deserved attention.
But Dani Rodrik isn’t so sure about Johnson’s proposed remedy, and I think Rodrik has a point:
Simon’s account is based on a very simple, and I
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I’m watching a video of a speech that Blackstone boss Steve Schwarzman gave at the Japan Society in New York a few weeks back (private equity is my topic of the week), and suddenly there he is attempting to answer Barbara’s question of why it’s apparently okay to stiff the bondholders at a car company but not at a bank:
It’s one thing
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A reader writes, in response to my Upside of Anger column on taxing Wall Street bonuses:
You appear to have a positive outlook regarding the government using the tax system to punish entities they don’t agree with. And you dare use the term “CAPITALIST” in your byline?? How hypocritical can one get?? Here is my take on the punishing
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