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The Financial Times continues its worrying over the fate of London as a financial center today. Continue reading
If Sandy Weill was so wrong about the merits of combining investment and commercial banks, why is he so insightful now that he's changed his mind? Continue reading
Does anyone really believe that if Malcolm Gladwell had called in sick for a speaking engagement at a decision-making class at Lehman that anything would have been different at the company? Continue reading
Teresa Ghilarducci in The New York Times' Sunday Review offers up the most striking conclusion from this vast social experiment that began somewhere in the late '70s: It doesn't work -- and it will never work. Continue reading
Talking ethics is easy. Actually doing something about it may require a saint. And there's not much of a market in sainthood these days. Continue reading
Much is made of Franklin Roosevelt's decision in the late '30s to try to balance the budget, thus inadvertently launching a second depression in 1938. But an even more revealing sequence of events occurred in Great Britain earlier in the '30s. Continue reading
Economics can be forbiddingly complex. But its policies work themselves out in an inevitably reductionist democratic context, whether in America, with its circuslike political campaigns, or in fractious Europe. Continue reading
Tell me what's real. What is this LIBOR anyway? A dog? A drug? It's a financial abstraction, an approximation arrived at through a survey, an informed guess. LIBOR is no Platonic ideal, shining over the skies of London like the... Continue reading
There's nothing like an economists' catfight to enliven a summer Friday in deep July. Today's main event: Jeffrey Sachs vs. Paul Krugman. Continue reading
Barry Lynn and Lina Khan provide a tonic to a highly romanticized view of a land of entrepreneurs endlessly promoted by politicians. But one should tiptoe through their statistics carefully. Continue reading
Do we want big banks to be essentially utilities, tightly regulated so that it's (almost) impossible for them to get into serious trouble, and small enough if they do that they can't cause harm? Continue reading
What can you draw from this conversation? Trichet is a tricky customer. But there is about this something of a dance across the edge of the volcano. Continue reading
What is the vision of a new City of London in which the reckless, the greedy and the speculators have been banished from the temple? Continue reading
The New York Times has a story on the front page today worrying about the departure of finance jobs out of New York ('near-shoring') and its effect on the city's tax base. Continue reading
