My new column is in the issue of Time with the large-eared-man on the cover and online here. It begins:
Over the past few months, we have heard banker after Wall Streeter after mortgage lender declare that market conditions are the worst since they got into the business. Some go even further. “The worst market crisis in 60 years,”
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Sorry for the anemic posting this week. I seem to have mostly recovered from the horrible disease I had a couple days ago, although I’ve been warned by lots of people (including Curious Capitalist Jr.) that it will probably recur. And now I’m in Southern California for a family thing (the funeral of a beloved grandmother-in-law, to be …
So I’m having breakfast this morning with Haiyan Wang and Anil K. Gupta, the wife-and-husband team behind the Maryland-based China India Institute (not under any circumstances to be confused with the India China Institute). They’re giving me their–quite compelling–spiel about just how amazingly unprecedentedly transformative the rise …
A mere three years ago, the nation’s two great government-created, privately owned, politically well-connected buyers of home mortgages, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were in disrepute. They’d both been buffeted by massive accounting scandals. Their CEOs had resigned in disgrace. Congress was talking about significantly reining in their …
One of the most fascinating economic stories of the past decade has been how the hapless investors who poured billions of dollars into Global Crossing, Worldcom and the like paved the way for the success of Indian outsourcers, Web 2.0 bandwidth hogs and all manner of other innovative enterprises. These telcos (over)built a global …
Another poll question on the economic power of nations, this time from Gallup (via Greg Mankiw):
“Which one of the following do you think is the leading economic power in the world today?”
China: 40 percent
The United States: 33 percent
Japan: 13 percent
The European Union: 7 percent
India: 2 percent
Russia: 2 percent
This is even …
So I’m back from skiing at (downhill) and near (cross country) Gore Mountain in the Adirondacks. The photo above is taken from somewhere around the top of the mountain. I’m pretty sure I took it right after making a couple of cell phone calls, because (a) I’m a total dork and (b) the tops of mountains are the only places in the …
Thrilling news! I have lined up a sucker friend and colleague to take over for me for the rest of this week and all of next! Her name is Barbara Kiviat (you can read her recent Time articles here). She’s younger than me and smarter than me and works harder than me, and, most importantly, she’s a one-time recipient of a Johns Hopkins …
I know, I know, I’m not a political blogger and I’m not supposed to be doing anything but working on my book this week. But I was thinking in the shower this morning (no kiddin’) about whether long service on Capitol Hill, in particular in the Senate, is the kiss of death for a presidential candidate. The traits that make you a …
See, I said there’d be pictures! “Pre-war,” in New York real estate parlance, means anything built before the 1940s. This sign, in case you can’t tell, adorns a hole in the ground. I assume that what the developers are trying to say is that the building they’re putting up will look like the surrounding apartment houses, most of which …
I know, I know, I promised to make no more mention of The Myth of the Rational Market until I had finished the manuscript. But my failure to finish things up over the past few weeks has motivated me to take the rest of this week off to work on it. So apart from maybe a photo or two, or any cool discoveries I make while delving through …
This was part of a mailing full of blank checks that I got from credit card purveyor Capital One on Saturday. By my reckoning, only one of these proposed uses of credit (“Build a deck”) is a genuine capital expenditure. Four more (“Have your house repainted,” “Buy a new TV,” “Join a gym,” and maybe “Update your wardrobe”) have some …
