From a Larry Lessig review of Robert Reich’s new book, Supercapitalism (via Ezra Klein):
[W]e need to understand the nature of the corporation — to make money — and come to love it, and yet, to keep it in its proper place, just as you can love a tiger, but know that it’s not the sort of thing that should play with your kid.
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The guy sitting at the table next to mine at the Fair Trade Coffee House here in Madison had a Dell laptop. He asked me for help. It was his son’s computer, he said, and he couldn’t figure out how to make the wifi work. I looked at the screen for a minute and finally said, “I dunno, I’m a Mac guy.”
“Me too,” he said. We both looked …
I guess I should mention at some point that I’m writing this week from America’s most insanely livable city, Madison, Wisconsin. Above is the view from my table at the Fair Trade Coffee House on State Street, where I’m typing these very words. Here’s a view down State Street toward the Capitol:
I’m in Madison because I’m the …
Stock markets around the world are having another crummy day. It’s always worth reiterating that the plus or minus 2% daily drops we’ve been seeing are nothing compared with the more than 20% decline on Oct. 19, 1987.
But this decline is not the product of some weird hiccup in the workings of financial markets, as was the case in …
Hedge fund manager and poker ace David Einhorn was the speaker at the 17th annual Graham & Dodd breakfast Friday morning. I arrived too late to get a seat, and left early because I was starving, but I did write down this quote:
Regulators are good at cleaning up fraud after the money is gone. Government doesn’t really know what to do
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Today’s the big day! The 20th anniversary of the Crash of 1987! We’ve already been deluged with reminiscences and will-it-happen-agains. If you want more, my friend and fellow Acalanes High School graduate Matthew Rees’s recounting in The American is the most thoughtful and exhaustive I’ve seen.
But, uh, will it happen again? Depends …
Yep, that’s him, the universally beloved New York Times columnist and author of the new book The Conscience of a Liberal (not to be confused with The Conscience of a Liberal). Why such a low-quality photo? Well, this is now the third in a series of Curious Capitalist posts featuring lousy cameraphone photos from book parties, and it …
In India, a lot of people are apparently worked up about the fact that the rupee has appreciated 20% against the dollar over the past five years. No matter that it had lost 85% of its value against the dollar over the previous two decades–the rise in the rupee now is seen as alarming and dangerous for the Indian economy. The folks at …
Following the example of Fox Business Channel, I’ve decided to make this a more aspirational business blog (no, not really, but bear with me for this post). So I thought I’d share the inspiring story of Aaron Perlut, with whom I had breakfast Wednesday. Here’s Aaron, as captured by my cameraphone:
Aaron, as you can see, has a …
The insanely prolific Dan Gross had a piece in the NYT Sunday mag about New York’s diminished profile as a financial center. Dan ascribes this mainly to the increasingly “multipolar” nature of the global economy, meaning that it’s not so much that there’s something wrong with New York as that there’s a lot more action in and around …
Because this blog sometimes covers the business of social networking, it seems appropriate to share the two social networking love songs I stumbled across last week. (If you’ve already heard ’em, move on. Nothing to hear here.)
The first, from the formerly ubiquitous ze frank, is the charming and insanely catchy “A Social Network for …
Dave Liniger, the co-founder and chairman of real estate brokerage giant RE/MAX, stopped by Time Monday along with RE/MAX CEO Margaret Kelly. Dave did almost all the talking, so much so that I had trouble keeping up with him at times. None of what he said was stop-the-presses shocking, but Liniger tends to be more of a plain talker than …
