I’ve got an essay up on CNNMoney.com, which will eventually find its way into the paper pages of Fortune. It begins:
There was a time (the 1990s, to be precise) when the concept of shareholder value made a bit of sense: Corporations focused on keeping shareholders happy, and their stock prices rose through the roof.
Things haven’t
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I know, I know, I really should be blogging about something other than my stinkin’ book reviews. But this is just too much to keep to myself. From the new Publishers Weekly (nine reviews down), a starred review that begins:
At the core of the current financial crisis has been the widely held assumption that markets behave rationally.
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Thanks to Ezra Klein’s brand new blog at washingtonpost.com, I just discovered a 10-day-old post by Jim Surowiecki that puts some meat on the bones of an argument that’s been bouncing around my head for a while. We’ve all heard lots and lots about how zombie banks supposedly doomed Japan to a lost decade of semi-depression, which means …
My post from a few weeks back featuring video of one Elske de Wall singing Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” in Frisian has been getting a steady stream of traffic lately thanks to Theresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden—inspiring me to share some more Netherlandish music. This time it’s Dutch supergroup The Nits (I’ve been a …
So my book has just gotten its first real review, in Library Journal (you have to scroll down through six other reviews to get to it.) It’s by Robbie Allen of St. Johns River Community College in Palatka, Fla., and it’s pretty positive. But then you get to the final sentence:
The style here is journalistic, with personal stories that
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Having taken some heat for daring to say that consumers are partly responsible for their own credit-card debt, I find it particularly interesting to see that I’m not the only one. We are currently running an entirely unscientific poll on Time.com, asking people: Which is more to blame for Americans’ credit-card problems—card issuers or …
My column for this week is online. Except it’s not really my column—it’s a part of the cover package on The Future of Work. I’d written it as a my regular one-page column, then was informed at the last minute that I needed to cut it by 20% and add a couple of sentences about, you know, the future of work. (If I worked for Dow Jones, by …
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This is a (much-abridged) video of my interview for TIME’s 10 Questions with CNBC’s Jim Cramer. And here’s the print version. I know some of you deeply disapprove of him. And I admit that it’s a weirdly constrained interview, given that my job was simply to ask questions posed by TIME.com …
This was just forwarded to me by former Curious Capitalist guest blogger Mark Gimein:
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — An economist on leave from the federal agency that insures bank deposits has been charged with the April 11 attempted robbery of a Kansas City-area bank.
Jeff Walser said he had a bomb in his briefcase and demanded money at the
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The New York Times offers a dubious account of how quickly federal efforts to prevent foreclosures are taking hold. I got at that a bit in a story I wrote a couple weeks ago. Though I’m not quite as quick to pass judgement. When I wrote that piece in late-April, the Feds had only just announced a way to deal with the second liens of …
I tend to get around to listening to podcasts long after they were recorded (other than the all-important Deutsche Welle Nachrichten podcasts, which have the advantage of being only 5 minutes long), so it was only on this morning’s subway ride to work that I got to last week’s semi-notorious Planet Money shouting match between Harvard …
I’ve written yet another in my continuing series of TIME.com pieces explaining that just because the economy is no longer falling off a cliff doesn’t mean it’s about to start booming. This time it’s about consumer spending and the pokey trajectory it’s likely to follow going forward, meaning that other sectors of the economy will have to …
