Economy & Policy

Someone calling himself The Epicurean Dealmaker has determined that I need to “spanked” for something I wrote Wednesday, and it pains me to admit that this TED is right. Actually, it doesn’t pain me all that much to admit that he’s right, since the opportunity to have my more ill-considered arguments swatted down by knowledgeable readers …

Because I know that what readers of this blog really want to see is photos of flaming trucks on the New Jersey Turnpike, I pulled out my camera phone when this vista appeared before me during an automotive voyage to the Garden State this morning:

Disappointingly, the flames were no longer raging by the time I got close. Instead, it …

Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman found out Wednesday that he could be spending more than 10 years behind bars for appointing former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy to a state hospital regulatory commission in exchange for a $500,000 Scrushy contribution to Siegelman’s unsuccessful campaign for a state lottery. Scrushy, the federal judge …

At the request of several commenters to my post on how U.S. corporate tax rates compare internationally (they’re really high), I have now dug out the OECD’s estimates of the taxes corporations actually paid, as a share of GDP, in 2005. As best I can tell, you have to pay money to the OECD or have them certify you as a journalist to to …

Calculated Risk, a really smart financial blog that because I’m a navel-gazing MSMer I only read for the first time last week, had a post over the weekend (link via Barry Ritholtz) mocking the New York Times for explaining away Bear Stearns’ hedge fund problems as “fallout from loose lending practices that showered money on people with …

My friend Ellen McGirt has a cool article on Al Gore in in the July Fast Company (which I know about because she hegemonically posted a link to it on her Facebook page). An excerpt:

Since his nonelection, Gore has become a millionaire many times over, bringing him, in financial terms, shoulder to shoulder with the C-suite denizens he

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Today brings us the economic-policy chapter of the big Washington Post series on how Dick Cheney runs America. It’s not nearly as dramatic or sinister-seeming as yesterday’s installment on torture ‘n’ stuff. Economic policy is like that, I guess.

One big takeaway is that economic policy in the Bush administration is run not by the …

John Authers in the FT makes the point (subscription required) that the great flight from risk that people with respect for market history have been predicting for a while now still hasn’t come to pass:

Angela Montero, of Société Générale, pointed out last week that Mexican bonds yielded 5.85 per cent. 10-year bonds in Colombia,

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From the latest fascinating essay by danah boyd, UC Berkeley grad student and online-social-networking guru (link via Howard Rheingold via joerissen):

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of

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A cousin who was passing through Schiphol over the weekend bought me a copy of my favorite newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad. I haven’t had time to actually read it yet, but I was immediately struck with how the NRC, always one of the widest newspapers on the planet, has so far resisted the trend toward skinnification. Next to the Wall …

Reader Marcus Choudhary has urged me to mention, amid all this talk about the sweet tax deal that private equity firms and private equity partners get, that corporate tax rates in the U.S. are pretty high. So if the folks at the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees really want to make our tax system more consistent and …

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein says it’s “emotion” that’s driving the Congressional push to change the tax treatment of private equity:

“Right now, sentiment is what is really transcendent,” Mr Blankfein said in an interview with the Financial Times. “But as you get into the consequences . . . for competitiveness and fairness .

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