Evan Thomas’s Newsweek cover story on Paul Krugman is timely, and—as with everything Thomas does—elegantly executed. I especially liked this passage:
If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he’s wrong, and you sense he’s being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but
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So Rick Wagoner is out at General Motors, at the request of the Obama administration. I’ve never known quite to make of the guy—most of GM’s many troubles aren’t his doing at all, but he had eight years to resolve them and came nowhere close to succeeding. I went to Alex Taylor’s November 25 Fortune cover story on GM to see what more I …
I’ve been watching Tim Geithner on Meet the Press (I recorded it). He was also on This Week, and I’ve been looking at the transcript of that, but I don’t think I can bear to watch it. Really, how can people sit through these shows? David Gregory asks Geithner a question, Geithner gives some prefab answer that doesn’t really address the …
We all know the problem with the American financial system. It’s that a few institutions have become too big and interconnected to fail. And so, instead of letting creative destruction work its magic and purge the rottenness out of our financial sector, we’re engaged in a sloppy, counterproductive, hugely expensive effort to keep these …
This is Marion Maneker channeling Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
We cannot have both debt leverage and a hyper-efficient system—the volatility is just too great. What Taleb explains—which no one else does—is that efficiency is already a form of leverage. A highly efficient system removes slack and magnifies small changes. Think of the
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Here’s some hugely important new that I am afraid I failed to report in a timely fashion: I was riding on the subway yesterday morning and Project Runway‘s Tim Gunn was standing next to me. I didn’t really have anything to say to him (I guess I could have asked if he thought my jacket worked with my shirt, but that didn’t seem …
I heard about Nick Kristof’s column on prediction yesterday, but I didn’t actually read it. (Because, you know, reading takes up valuable time.) But Mrs. Curious Capitalist points me to this important excerpt:
[I]t turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.
What? You don’t …
Here’s my latest, about that asset-buying plan Tim Geithner proposed oh so long ago (well, Monday).
No, it wasn’t billed as that. But it’s hard to read this section of the Framework for Regulatory Reform released by Treasury today any other way:
We must create a resolution regime that provides authority to avoid the disorderly liquidation of any nonbank financial firm whose failure would have serious adverse effects on the financial
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So I was sitting there at the Buyouts East private equity conference today, listening to a discussion on “Trudging Through the Credit Winter.” It was a bunch of mid-career guys—mostly from PE firms but also a lawyer and a couple of lenders—talking about how it’s really tough out there but they’re coming up with creative ways to do …
I’m planning to attend some of the Buyouts East conference today to learn a little about what’s up in private equityland, and to prepare I’ve been leafing through a friend’s copy of Buyouts magazine. An opinion piece by managing editor Michael Baron caught my eye (it appears to be available online only to Buyouts subscribers). It’s …
I’ve got a new piece up on TIME.com about the spate of slightly better-than-expected economic numbers we’ve been seeing over the past week or two. I make no bold predictions in it, but I’ll make one here: We are in fact seeing the beginning of the end of this recession in the U.S. But the recovery will be fitful and problematic, and we …
