The you-gotta-love-hedge-funds argument, espoused by the likes of Sebastian Mallaby, rests heavily on the assumption that hedge funds spur important innovations that in turn make our economy better, stronger, faster. Here, from the FT, is striking evidence of such innovation:
At least one US hedge fund is refusing to take on new partners
…
Princeton, New Jersey, Saturday night. Not taken with my cameraphone. (My brother, appalled at some of my past photographic efforts in this blog, has just sent me a copy of National Geographic’s The Camera Phone Book: How to Shoot Like a Pro, Print, Store, Display, Send Images, Make a Short Film. Thanks, Harry! I’ll get to work on …
As part of this week’s continuing series on my son’s friends’ siblings in the news, here’s an interesting story from today’s NYT:
When Olivia Lara-Gresty saw the metal detectors at the entrance of Middle School 54 on the Upper West Side, she turned around and ran home to ditch her contraband before joining her sixth-grade class.
The
…
Former Intel boss Andy Grove has a letter to the presidential candidates in the latest Fortune. An excerpt:
Your staff is probably working on a big, ambitious plan to fix health care.
Depending on whether you lean left or right, it’s either a universal health-care plan or a way to increase market influence throughout the health-care
…
My latest column is in the issue of Time with an ice-cream sundae on the cover and online here. It begins:
In January 1981, as gasoline prices set all-time highs in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war, oil giant Exxon announced that it would pour $11 billion into capital investment and exploration over the course of the year. That was a 35%
…
Gas prices are high at the moment, the highest they’ve been (adjusting for inflation) since all-time records were set back in 1981. Crude oil prices are high, too, but they were even higher last summer.
What’s up with that? The word on Capitol Hill is that refiners and gas retailers are gouging us–the House even passed a bill last week …
The second version of the first quarter GDP numbers were released this morning, and they mark the economy down to a 0.6% annual growth rate from the 1.3% rate estimated back on April 27. If that gets knocked down a little more when the “final” version comes out June 28, then ratcheted down even more in the benchmark revision a year or …
Curious Capitalist Jr. has asked me to write a post about his friend’s older brother, Paul Lindseth, who made it to the quarterfinals of the 80th Scripps National Spelling Bee today before meeting his Waterloo in the word “oubliette.” Which apparently means “a concealed dungeon having a trap door in the ceiling as its only opening.” …
My neighbor Nathan Thornburgh (we share an office wall here at Time) has a fascinating article about guest worker programs in North Carolina in the current issue of the magazine that ends on this decidedly subversive note:
So what’s the solution? One clue can be found in the failed amnesty of 1986, widely viewed as the genesis of the
…
The president’s choice of Bob Zoellick to be the new World Bank chief seems pretty obvious after the fact. He’s a loyal Bush soldier rather than an out-on-a-limb advocate like Wolfowitz, which means he’s less controversial among administration critics yet more likely to actually do what the administration wants, whatever that might be. …
A special treat for the millions of German-speaking Curious Capitalist readers: An interview I did with the Austrian daily Der Standard about Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones bid. I don’t think there’s much of anything in it I haven’t already said in this blog, so I won’t bother translating. But here’s a thrilling excerpt.
DER STANDARD: Warum
…
Curious Capitalist regular Peter Varhol had an interesting comment on my China column. An excerpt:
I’ve always been confused by the spend versus save debate … What is bizarre, I think, is that while economists and economic writers such as yourself bemoan the lack of savings behavior in the US, tax policy decidedly supports spending
…
