GE chief executive Jeff Immelt isn’t a big fan of the $500,000 pay cap for executives at financial institutions that get additional government help, which the Obama Administration announced yesterday, but he still thinks Barack Obama rocks.
“It’s in the best interest of the citizens of the country for Jamie Dimon to run JP Morgan,” …
Did you know that Time.com also offers podcasts? Yes, it’s true. This isn’t your grandmother’s Time magazine!
Each week, Katherine Lanpher interviews the likes of me and Justin and contributing editor John Curran about what’s going on in the economy. You can listen to the most recent installment by clicking here and scrolling down to …
From a Congressional Budget Office estimate released today on the impact of some amendment or other to the Senate stimulus bill:
The macroeconomic impacts of any economic stimulus program are very uncertain. Economic theories differ in their predictions about the effectiveness of stimulus. Furthermore, large fiscal stimulus is rarely
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Back in 2006, Matt Miller wrote a column for Fortune that seemed very clever to me at the time and now is looking downright prescient. The gist of it:
Here’s my outlandish theory: that economic resentment at the bottom of the top 1 percent of America’s income distribution is the new wild card in public life. Ordinary workers won’t rise
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Friend of the Curious Capitalist Mark Zandi is the subject today of both a Washington Post article and a lengthy post on the WSJ’s Real Time Economics blog. The gist of both is that he has become the country’s Chief Stimulus Economist. From the Post:
The 49-year-old economist is a Democratic dream, a former adviser to GOP presidential
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I’m back from Switzerland and I’m coughing and have a fever. Isn’t air travel great?
Anyway, I wrote this list of Nine Things I Learned at Davos at a friend’s apartment in Zurich Sunday night and at the Zurich Airport Monday morning. It would have been 10 things but I ran out of time. At least one is recycled from the blog. And the …
Cheap mortgages are back. Rather, the idea of the government standing behind cheap mortgages in order to get people to buy houses and prop up home prices is back. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell starting trumpeting the notion in full force today. The argument: that a 4% fixed-rate loan for “any credit-worthy borrower”—whether …
A couple weeks back, Justin liked Jack Guttentag’s explanation of why banks receiving TARP money shouldn’t be made to immediately lend it out. This morning I am equally impressed with Bert Ely’s opinion piece in the WSJ about why pressuring banks to lend could backfire. Among the points that bear repeating:
Lost in too many discussions
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It may be the first well-informed panel I’ve ever moderated, in the sense that you all know you don’t know anything.
The FT’s Martin Wolf, midway through a discussion with Montek Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Indian Planning Commission; Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada; Christine LaGarde, finance minister of France; John …
The Tayyip Erdogan-Shimon Peres rumble last night was partly about Gaza. But it was also about the limitations of panel moderation at Davos. I don’t mean to single out David Ignatius, whose failure to keep Israeli President Peres from vastly exceeding his allotted time apparently incensed the Turkish prime minister. I had been at another …
My report on the day one TIME Board of Economists’ session at Davos is in the new international edition(s) of TIME and online here. It begins:
Last year, the annual gathering of TIME’s Board of Economists on the first day of the World Economic Forum in Davos was dominated by a debate over just how bad the then-gathering financial crisis
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One of the major themes of the World Economic Forum this year and every year is “Full payment required in advance.” This, more than anything else, explains why the show is going on in somewhat inappropriate style here in the midst of global economic crisis. Sponsors’ dollars were already in, hotel rooms were already paid for …
