Karen Tumulty over at Swampland has a question (spurred by this Washington Post article on John Edwards’ work for Fortress Investment Group) on politicians’ ties to big hedge fund and private equity money:
Is this going to be an issue as the campaign moves forward? My own business writing days ended long ago, when derivatives were still
…
Economist Brad DeLong, as part of his long-running campaign to persuade the world that journalists are flawed (and many are; unlike academic economists, who are right about everything and also smell great!), had a post Saturday tearing into the Economist for allegedly mischaracterizing the neoconservative movement. Brad apparently thinks …
Michael Kinsley’s column in Time this week is about campaign finance, among other things. I know this not because I read it in the magazine: Curious Capitalist Jr. had a fever Friday and Mrs. CC was out of town, so I didn’t go into the office and therefore do not have a copy. I got to Kinsley’s column instead via Ezra Klein’s blog. Which …
Sorry, the excitement is getting to me.
I spent Thursday in Washington listening to members of the Bush administration explain themselves to the Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum (a club to which I, absurdly enough, belong). The deal was that most of the chats were off the record. I’d feel worse about adhering to that agreement if anything truly revelatory had …
My column in the current Time is about Realogy CEO Henry Silverman’s return to the private equity world he left almost 15 years ago (he was a partner at Blackstone, and before that at Saul Steinberg’s Reliance Group Holdings). It took most of the space I had just to explain who Silverman is and why he matters, so I don’t quote him much …
My new column is about the latest twist in the remarkable career of Realogy CEO Henry Silverman. It begins:
On the morning of April 19, the private-equity firm Apollo Management acquired Realogy–the company behind real estate brokerages Coldwell Banker, Century 21 and ERA. It was not, by modern standards, a huge transaction: the sale
…
I’m spending today in Washington getting “briefed” by various Bush Administration types as part of something called the Young Global Leaders U.S. Policy Roundtable. Because, dontcha know, I am a Young Global Leader. It’s all supposed to be off the record except for talks by Condi Rice and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs …
Wow, life in Time‘s D.C. office is just so, well, thrilling. Here’s the bureau chief reacting just minutes ago to Ana Marie Cox’s admonition that he needs to post on Swampland more often. (Actually, he’s reacting to me saying I’m about to take his picture with my cameraphone, but he reacted the same way to Ana about five seconds …
Big news: The Dow closed at a new record high today of 12,815.38. Yeehaw and all that.
Except that, when you adjust for inflation (and investing is all about adjusting for inflation), the Dow is still nowhere near the highs of 2000. I’d make a chart for you, but I’m sitting in a D.C. hotel room at the moment and need to run soon. If …
A commenter to my post on the strange consistency of the federal tax burden over the past six decades wondered if factoring in state and local taxes would change the picture. (He also wondered about Social Security taxes, but those were already included as federal receipts in my previous chart.) So I went again to the overflowing well of …
The first post went up a couple of hours ago. A sample:
Blogging is different than writing qua writing. In writing, for instance, you often need something to say. Not so with a blog. In fact, the best blogs are lovely hot air balloons rising over the teeming landscape of digital avatars rushing about, to and fro, waving their arms and
…
