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Deep within Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner's book on the mortgage crisis, 'Reckless Endangerment,' comes a line to ponder: 'The press picked up on the craze, publishing thousands of stories about a potential bubble in the real estate market.' Continue reading
Goldman Sachs may be the vampire squid. But it had sense enough to try to get its employees home on a rainy Friday night and remind the rest of us we're just poor slobs in a long line. Continue reading
It's the season of the carp. It's the age of the gripe, the whine, the flounder on the welcome mat. Timothy Geithner grumps at Europeans over derivatives and blames Brits for "light touch" regulation. The Brits' cranky retort highlights American... Continue reading
Ezra Klein has a column up at The Washington Post that takes apart 'Inside Job,' the Charles Ferguson documentary that has been praised so lavishly, not least by walking off with an Academy Award. Continue reading
I would, if forced to take a stand, vote for higher capital standards for the big banks, though the question is not nearly as clear and straightforward as Joe Nocera makes out in a recent New York Times article. Continue reading
In a recent article on say-on-pay, Businessweek steadfastly ignores the long historical pattern of institutional passivity. Continue reading
Charles W. Collier provides a rigorous examination of the conceptual grounds for the efficient-market hypothesis. Continue reading
For all their credentials, technical economists tend to be viewed by the political classes as either annoying carpers, overeducated intellectuals without a clue of the real world or comprehensible only as the instrument of some large special interest. Continue reading
This is a funny place, Washington." Thus spoke Timothy Geithner, secretary of the Treasury and anxious jogger in "Too Big to Fail," in a video interview conducted by Politico. Geithner, my credulous friends, was being ironic. He pretended to be... Continue reading
Ambiguities in the rules do not exist just to take bureaucrats off the hook, but to provide some flexibility in an extremely dynamic world and to reflect complex underlying conditions. Continue reading
We should all be nervous faced with the increasingly obvious reality that our politicians, policy makers and, perhaps most important, our brand-name economists seem to have no idea what's going on out there. Continue reading
Is cancer a homogenous disease that can eventually be 'cured' by investigation of fundamental cellular malfunctions, or is it a heterogeneous jumble of tumors and mutations? Continue reading
'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace' is our age's version of Oliver Stone's 'JFK': a tangled, difficult, painful history simplified into a cartoon for folks unwilling to deal with complexities and ambiguities. Continue reading
