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Warren Buffett is in a little hot water over David Sokol and whether he a) did or did not violate some legal and fraternal trust by not revealing to Warren (who did not ask, twice) that he had brought Lubrizol shares and talked to an investment banker and b) whether Warren has a succession problem, a governance problem or an age problem. Continue reading
the role of reputation is, at best, ambiguous. It's quite easy to worry about your reputation if your position in this world is fixed by birth, by name or by association. It's quite simple to emphasize reputation when regulation and peer pressure define your field of action. Continue reading
Business schools find themselves trapped in a dilemma that they, again, share with journalism: their audience. Continue reading
What is a bank? We used to know. In days of yore, banks were easily defined and recognized as banks: columns, marble, vaults, tellers with toasters, brown-suited bankers with putters. Wells Fargo and Bank of America were banks; Goldman, Sachs... Continue reading
In the financial punditry racket, there's no voice quite like the Financial Times' John Kay, certainly not in the United States: skeptical, elliptical, calm, essayistic, sneakily funny. Continue reading
'Fallacies, Irrelevant Facts and Myths in the Discussion of Capital Regulation,' as one can tell from the title, is less a work of deep primary research and more a polemic, buttressed by lots of other papers on banking and capital. Continue reading
Of late arrows -- short, bowed and anorexically thin -- have been proliferating in magazines that I flip through as I wolf down lunch. What is their purpose? Continue reading
'Closure' is merely the triumph of one interpretation and set of emotions over others. Similar tendencies play themselves out in controversies far less weighty than the Civil War. Continue reading
Sir John Vickers released his interim report on banking regulation and described it as 'moderate,' emphasizing increased capital, a U.K. version of resolution authority and the attempt to ring fence consumer operations. Continue reading
The clouds part, and he descends, like Spider-Man, into our midst again: Alan Greenspan, philosopher. A chorus of bankers, home and abroad, hums in the background like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Congress scurries about. How do you turn off the... Continue reading
What Quattrone's career, and the arc of the Valley's history, shows, is how delicate the balancing of all these forces and trends are: private and public, startups and large companies, innovation and (often profitable) stasis. Continue reading
A Ponzi scheme is one man -- or one organization -- deliberately defrauding the public. In a bubble, we are the market. And in a widely accepted welfare scheme like Social Security, political and economic choices are made to tie the generations together. Continue reading
