After my brief dalliance with the prophets of financial Armageddon, I have returned to the world of yeah, but. As in, yeah the residential real estate market is in a world of pain, but commercial real estate isn’t in any kind of trouble at all.
The reason is that commercial real estate had its meltdown in 2000 and 2001, as the dot-coms …
On Friday the Commerce Department announced a crackdown on shiny Chinese paper. I can’t even begin to tell you whether the particular decision was warranted, and I don’t know if it’s mere saber-rattling about a triviality or the beginning of a new era in U.S. trade policy. But I do know that if Americans really want to erase or at least …
The Curious Capitalist family lunched together today, at Frankie’s Spuntino on the Lower East Side. The bill for the three of us was $57.44, which I thought was reasonable enough (the fact that we weren’t drinking certainly kept the price down). But Curious Capitalist Jr., who is seven, was appalled. We don’t eat out all that often, and …
I can’t tell whether this investing dictum, from shaggy-haired hedge-fund manager Cody Willard‘s column in the Weekend FT, is really smart, or is the sort of temporarily sensible sounding nonsense that we’ll all giggle at after the next market crash. I’m leaning at least slightly toward the former:
Those who empower, win. Those who
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Happy April Fool’s Day, friends. I’m off to Japan today to visit my folks, and thus hereby declare a two-week hiatus for WORK IN PROGRESS. (I know, I know…a real blogger wouldn’t take a vacation…a real blogger would send thoughts and observations and snapshots from her trip. Here, I’ll sum it up for you real quick. Day 1: 24-hour …
I’m on the Princeton campus, where I spoke earlier this afternoon on a panel on careers in the publishing industry (there will still be careers in the publishing industry, right?) and visited a guy named Krugman. The big excitement, though, was seeing what use Meg Whitman’s $30 million has been put to.
The money went toward building the …
There’s a moment in the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (it’s also in the book, on page 242) where the company’s head of HR is asked at a December 1999 employee meeting, “Should we invest all of our 401(k) in Enron stock?”
“Absolutely! Don’t you guys agree?” she says, looking over at Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, who are …
My latest column is up online, and in the issue of Time with the penguin on the cover. It begins:
There are those who fret that current troubles in real estate will lead to an economic slowdown, maybe a recession. Then there’s Peter Schiff. “Our standard of living is going to decline,” the Connecticut stockbroker confidently declares.
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In this week’s TIME magazine, I write about pastors’ wives in an article titled “What God Joined Together.” You may not think of this as a workplace topic; in fact, it runs under the “religion” section banner. But make no mistake, being the wife of a minister is a job–and a doozy of one at that. The story begins:
HELP WANTED: Pastor’s
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I always envied those lucky working stiffs over in Europe, with their luxurious pensions and endless holidays and unthinkably generous maternity leaves. It turns out it’s not so easy across the pond, either. Knowledge@Wharton, the excellent online magazine by the Wharton Business School, reports in an article today that though German …
The author of the world’s absolutely, positively greatest private equity blog, Going Private, has discovered that a lot of people in the “McMedia” (that is, not just me) thought there was something ironic about Stephen Schwarzman, longtime critic of public equity markets, deciding to take Blackstone Group public. Here’s her contrary …
I was mostly kidding when I said that a döner kebab van in Leesburg, Va., represented deep truths about globalization. But then I got this comment, from one Michael Pöppelmann:
I am an exchange student from Germany and currently in the United States. Doener is my most favorite food. Sometimes I even dream about eating it, just because it
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