In one of the most entertaining of the many entertaining passages in Robert Heilbronner’s The Worldly Philosophers, Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter regales his Harvard students in the mid-1930s with these encouraging words:
Chentleman, you are vorried about the depression. You should not be. For capitalism, a depression is a
…
Barry Ritholtz reprints a scary e-mail from a friend in the collaterized debt obligation business (don’t you have a friend in the CDO business?):
I was talking to CDO managers in mid-’05 that were saying how rich sub-prime MBS was and how wrong everyone was for buying that stuff at the spreads they were. To a man, they all agreed they
…
There’s an article titled “How Will Millennials Manage?” on Harvard Business School’s web site. It’s written by James Heskett, a professor at Harvard’s b-school. According to his own experience and that of the many managers he’s known and interviewed, Heskett writes this summary of the work habits of Generation Y (bolds mine):
They are
…
My new column is in the issue of Time with Mother Theresa on the cover and online here. It begins:
Much of what Ben Bernanke spends his days doing oscillates between the incomprehensibly arcane and the unspeakably dull. Lately, though, the Federal Reserve chairman has a stark, even exciting task at hand. He’s been imitating Jimmy Stewart
…
I checked out Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s 2000 book Essays on the Great Depression at the library the other day. It’s not what you’d call a page turner, but it does offer some cool insights into his thinking. It’s a collection of lectures and journal articles, some going as far back as the early 1980s, but as he doesn’t disavow any of …
I just got off the phone with a guy in Gaza who coordinates a jobs program there for college graduates. Unemployment there is sky high even for college grads, in large part because the economy is in shambles but also because universities fail to prepare students for real-life careers. Accounting majors may gain a thorough grasp of …
The collective wigging out of the quantitative hedge funds earlier this month has been one of the most fascinating stories to come out of the market’s summer troubles. Joe Nocera wrote the best layman’s explanation in his NYT column on Saturday (a column that, I feel obliged to note because it makes me sound important, could not have …
In the NYT this morning, David Leonhardt writes that the Federal Reserve should do more to push against inflating investment bubbles:
The Fed could have tightened financial rules, like the amount of cash that must be put up for a given investment. It also could have used the bully pulpit. Imagine what might have happened in 2005 if Mr.
…
Businessweek.com has a lovely slide show (link from Harold Maass) of mortgage industry executives who used to be really rich and now aren’t so much.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg has an article (via Trader Daily) on how the credit crunch “may cut Wall Street bonuses for the first time in five years.”
Hooray for that, I say. I’m not at all …
The big news in Holland Tuesday is that a TV report claiming that soccer star Mark van Bommel is planning to become a German citizen was a hoax that Van Bommel helped manufacture. This is very funny stuff in Holland, I think. (You want to become a … German?!? Ha ha ha ha ha.)
Anyway, I didn’t find it all that funny, but a roundup of …
How much do Americans hate their jobs? A Gallup poll found that about 77% of Americans hate their jobs. Another found Americans hate their jobs more than in the past 20 years; fewer than half say they’re satisfied. Other surveys have found that 87% of Americans don’t like their jobs.
Then there’s this University of Chicago study from …
In an e-mail that came in while I was on vacation, reader Mike Mitchell wrote:
Just curious about something I see you and others mention frequently, especially in light of Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal. The phrase typically invoked is “right-wing editorial page”. I read the WSJ every day – read the
…
