I spent the weekend in a house full of old books. One of them was the Fiftieth Anniversary Report of Harvard’s Class of 1922, where I found this remarkable statement from Hartford lawyer/art-collector Joseph Louis Shulman:
To allow myself two regrets, one is that my wife has not been with me the past ten years, knowing as I do what a
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From the always excellent Bill Powell in Shanghai:
About 18 months ago, Liu Junling, an upwardly mobile single Chinese woman, had a conversation with her boss, the CEO of a large, politically connected real estate developer in Shanghai. For the previous five years, people in China’s largest city had lived and breathed the property
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My latest column is in the Time with the various not-left-behind kids on the cover and online here. It begins:
Over the course of this year, China’s government will find itself with more than $300 billion in new foreign-currency reserves, mostly dollars, that it will have to park somewhere. That’s in addition to more than $1 trillion
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I’ve been thinking it’s my duty as a business/economics blogger to say something about the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, but I’ve struggled to figure out what. Happily, Clive Crook takes care of at least part of the job in today’s FT (subscription required):
At a glance, the Senate proposal has much to be said for it.
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This morning, at about 9 a.m. The orange-ish blob in the middle is the Staten Island Ferry. And I know, the cameraphone isn’t really doing the job. But it was really nice down there, and I felt the need to share.
From the FT:
China will gradually take over the role of the US as the world’s largest manufacturer but will do this only by 2020, with the US’s position in the global league table of manufacturers remaining surprisingly strong, according to an authoritative economic study.
Global Insight, a Washington-based economics consultancy,
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The other day I encountered the famous Hallo Berlin cart on 54th Street with only one guy in line and blogged about it. Here’s a shot of a more normal state of affairs, taken today around 1:30.
To readers tiring of the superficial, heavily food-oriented nature of my recent posts: Sorry, I’ve been busy (and hungry).
Two words: garbage plates.
Another in my continuing series of really low-quality cameraphone photos of book parties, this time from the hoedown for Peter Bernstein’s Capital Ideas Evolving at the Mercedes dealership on Park Avenue Monday night. I took the photo from out on the sidewalk. Inside were a bunch of people who make a whole lot more money than I do …
With David Beckham’s hugely expensive arrival in Los Angeles coming ever closer, it might be worth revisiting just what he’s been doing back in Madrid. From Richard Williams’ blog at Guardian.co.uk:
Last January 13, two days after he announced that he would be moving to Los Angeles next season, Fabio Capello said the Englishman would
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From Bob Herbert’s column in today’s NYT (available to subscribers only):
A lot of New Yorkers are doing awfully well. There are 8 million residents of New York City, and roughly 700,000 are worth a million dollars or more. The average price of a Manhattan apartment is $1.3 million. The annual earnings of the average hedge fund manager
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Last week, Montgomery County, Md., joined New York and Philadelphia in banning partially hydrogenated oils in restaurants. Washington Post columnist/blogger Marc Fisher decried this development:
It’s fairly clear that trans fats are bad for you. And lots of food businesses are reacting to the widespread public opposition to trans fats by
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