The FT reports on new research showing that female directors damage corporate profits. Sexy headline. I dug up the study itself to try to resolve the fact that other research has shown the exact opposite (as the piece in the FT points out). Here are the main conclusions of the research, by Renee Adams of the University of Queensland and …
Wall Street & Markets
The man who forecast the financial crisis. In 1975
I just checked out a copy of Chris Welles’s 1975 classic, The Last Days of the Club, from my favorite library. It’s the story of the unraveling in the early 1970s of the New York Stock Exchange’s virtual monopoly on stock trading. Wrote Welles of the NYSE’s member firms (“the Club”):
Through one of the most systematic and long-standing,
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Goldman Sachs would like to go back to doing what it was doing, thank you
Jenny Anderson has a very entertaining piece in today’s New York Times (that I’m kind of amazed didn’t make page 1) about business-as-usual returning at Goldman Sachs:
“We did not have a near-death experience,” said Gary D. Cohn, Goldman’s president. The government saved the financial industry as a whole, but it did not save
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An entirely too self-referential post about media clouds and Swedish bank rescues
Patricia Cohen has an interesting story in today’s NYT about Media Cloud, a very cool-sounding system designed by some folks at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (including my old friend Yochai Benkler) to track the flow of topics and ideas through the media. This passage bothered me a just little, though:
Using some of the
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Are credit-card companies getting their groove back?
One of the nicer effects of the credit crunch has been less junk mail from card companies looking to sign you up. Is that trend ending? The good folks at Synovate, a firm that tracks who mails what, made this chart. There was a long, hard fall in the number of credit card offers going out—but that drop slowed substantially in the …
‘No Free Lunch’ vs. ‘The Price is Right’
Economist Dick Thaler has a new FT opinion piece that says nice things about (and quotes extensively from) The Myth of the Rational Market. (Thanks, Dick!) In it, he makes the case that the efficient market hypothesis consists of two main ideas, “No Free Lunch” and “The Price is Right,” that have met very different fates over the past …
Breaking news: Tim Geithner knows how to swear!
The talk of the Twittersphere tonight is Damian Paletta and Deborah Solomon’s WSJ story about Tim Geithner cutting loose on Ben Bernanke, Sheila Bair, Mary Schapiro et. al. in an “expletive-laden critique last Friday as frustration grows over the Obama administration’s faltering plan to overhaul U.S. financial regulation.” He’s …
China can’t save the world economy. Not yet, at least
My Shanghai-based colleague Bill Powell has an excellent cover story in the Asia edition of TIME asking the big question: “Can China Save the World?” His answer is no, its economy just isn’t big enough. But that’s changing fast:
If Beijing can come through the global crisis without an economic meltdown of its own, its leaders’ reputation
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Wall Street’s not so-secret profit engine (the Fed)
Henny Sender has a story in the FT about the fact that Wall Street firms have been making lots of money trading with the Federal Reserve. I can think of two valid reactions to this:
1) No duh! Ensuring the health (a.k.a. profitability) of the financial system is a major responsibility of the Fed. The financial system was near collapse …
Career Thrown Off Track? Ten Ways to Reinvent Yourself (Some of Them Serious)
The recession has lasted longer than any in history—certainly long enough for the unemployed millions to realize that their old jobs are gone for good, and that it may be time to make some dramatic career shifts.
New column: The pay crackdown
My new column, on Washington’s campaign to regulate executive and Wall Street pay, is online. It’s got a lot of Lucian Bebchuk in it, and this morning Bebchuk is at it again, with a WSJ.com op-ed (co-authored with his Harvard Law School colleague Alma Cohen) making the case that it appears banks have actually gotten more generous in …
Do bankers still have clout in Washington?
In working on my column last week about the good times at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, I had interesting conversations with a couple of people who know a lot more than I do, MIT economist Simon Johnson and Brookings Institution/Kauffman Foundation economist/lawyer/all-around-policy-wonk Robert Litan. Sadly, none of their quotes made …