My latest column is online. It’s about the private equity business, and it was inspired by the gloomy talk by private equiteer George Siguler that I wrote about last week.
I quote Siguler in the column, and I spell his name correctly. I had trouble with lots of others. Copy editors here caught me calling Blackstone boss Stephen …
While looking for my very first magazine article online (because a fourth grader had asked me about it), I came across this remarkable utterance by Sandy Weill in a 1997 piece I wrote about the Morgan Stanley-Dean Witter merger:
“I think we found out in the 1980s that you really can’t be all things to all people,” says Weill, who also
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The final communique of the G-20 summit is out. Here’s my favorite part:
4. We have today therefore pledged to do whatever is necessary to:
* restore confidence, growth, and jobs;
* repair the financial system to restore lending;
* strengthen financial regulation to rebuild trust;
* fund and reform our international financial
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The Financial Accounting Standards Board decided today to go ahead with its previously announced plans (albeit with some tweaks) to make it easier for banks to say the assets on their books are worth whatever they want to say they’re worth. The stock market reacted with seeming approval, with the S&P 500 up almost more than 3% on the day …
I had a talk two years ago with Kenneth Rogoff, the Harvard professor and former IMF chief economist, about the future of the IMF. The IMF in its present form, he argued, made no sense.
“If you look today at the IMF’s total lendable resources, they’re $150 to $200 billion,” he said. “China has more than $1 trillion in reserves, Taiwan …
Both Gillian Tett and IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn make the argument in today’s FT that the G-20 leaders are in denial about the toxic assets clogging up the global financial system. (Don’t they mean legacy assets?)
Strauss-Kahn describes the problem:
The US . . . is rightly insisting on stimulus and the EU rightly insisting on
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TIME White House correspondent Michael Scherer, on the scene with all the big cheeses in London, has written a really smart piece on the once yawn-inducing, now possibly all-important issue of global capital-flow imbalances. My contribution? Sneaking a plug for Martin Wolf’s new book into the last paragraph.
I missed this yesterday. From Paul Krugman:
So in 2007 the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation — which stands behind corporate pensions — switched from bonds only to lots of stocks, buying in at, natch, the peak of the market. Oops. And this is big stuff: the Bush administration may have left us all a gratuitous loss of hundreds of
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One of my TIME overlords called me this afternoon to say that he had read James Surowiecki’s thoughtful defense of the Geithner plan in the latest New Yorker and Joe Stiglitz’s thoughtful attack on it in today’s New York Times and the juxtaposition made his head hurt.
Welcome to my world, I more or less said. Regular readers of this …
I spent a reasonably pleasant half hour earlier today taping this week’s edition of On the Line, “The International Public Affairs Talk Show,” which will air starting tomorrow night on your local Voice of America station. (What, you don’t have a local Voice of America station? Try online.) The subject matter was the Chrysler/GM …
Amartya Sen has an essay in the New York Review of Books (thanks for the tip, pneogy) that I really like. First, he neatly dispenses with the notion that we need to ditch or entirely reinvent capitalism:
[D]o we really need some kind of “new capitalism” rather than an economic system that is not monolithic, draws on a variety of
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I’ve been amazed at the tough line the Obama administration has taken on Detroit in the past few days. But David Brooks thinks it’s all show:
[B]y enmeshing the White House so deeply into G.M., Obama has increased the odds that March’s menacing threat will lead to June’s wobbly wiggle-out. The Obama administration and the Democratic
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