Search
Stout's goal is to shred the theoretical, empirical and ideological arguments that have made what she calls 'shareholder primacy' and what's popularly known as shareholder value the dominant and animating idea in corporate governance. Continue reading
The world Conard leaves us to contemplate -- a world of birth, material accumulation and death -- is chilling in its meaninglessness. Continue reading
'The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation' is not an institutional history in the academic sense; rather, it's an attempt to see a once-pre-eminent institution through the lives of some of its most noteworthy employees. Continue reading
Christensen's new book attempts to tell readers how to be happy and satisfied with their lives. But how do his own management ideas translate into living? Continue reading
Jonathan Schlefer in 'The Assumptions Economists Make' has seemingly set himself the task of closely examining and thinking about the models that lurk at the heart of the various schools of economics. Continue reading
Noam Scheiber is very clear in his point of view in his newly published dissection of the Obama administration's economic policy. Continue reading
In his new book, UCLA law professor and popular blogger Stephen Bainbridge provides a longer historical perspective on one aspect of the choking proliferation of rulemaking. Continue reading
Writing about someone like Keynes who personally wrote so much, so well, must be a daunting task. Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman more than keep up, not by competing with Keynes, but by letting him speak, in all his many voices. Continue reading
Nicholas Wapshott's 'Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics,' appears just as the debate over austerity is once again heating up and a presidential campaign is lurching into gear, to the grind of metal and to a haze of blue smoke. Continue reading
Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner offer up their long-awaited dissection of the mortgage crisis in 'Reckless Endangerment.' But beyond a warning about hybrid structures, what do the authors really want? Continue reading
'Beyond Mechanical Markets' takes aim at a dominant macroeconomic impulse that, in popular terms encompasses the rational-expectations hypothesis. Continue reading
Perhaps the most complete argument for utility banking -- and one of the most sophisticated takes on the financial crisis yet published -- has received less attention than it deserves: 'A Call for Judgment: Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy,' by Amar Bhidé. Continue reading
The MIT Press has just published an anorexically thin book on financial regulation, 'Reforming U.S. Financial Markets: Reflections Before and Beyond Dodd-Frank,' that should be enlightening, but isn't. Continue reading
There's been considerable comment and discussion about a short book recently published by Tyler Cowen, the George Mason economist who is one of the founders and regular posters of the Marginal Revolution blog. Continue reading
David Skeel's 'The New Financial Deal' takes an intelligent look at Dodd-Frank in its entirety, pointing out its strengths and weaknesses and offering suggestions for improvements. Continue reading
The long-awaited 'All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis' has arrived, marking the end of a nearly two-year-long stretch of books commissioned in the months after Lehman Brothers fell. Continue reading
Felix Rohatyn has written his memoirs, 'Dealings: A Political and Financial Life.' It's a fairly thin book, particularly considering the density and length of his career, and it has real charm. Continue reading
There is a long and distinguished literature on what's known, in the sniffy French, as 'la trahison des clercs' -- the betrayal of the intellectuals. 'Capital Offense' makes its own contribution to that genre. Continue reading
Chris Welles died a month ago at 72. Welles was one of the pioneering journalists of what might be called the "new" Wall Street, writing for Life magazine in the '60s, Institutional Investor in the '70s, then, after a stint... Continue reading
Roger Lowenstein, the author of a fine biography of Warren Buffett, the chronicler of the failure of Long-Term Capital Management and now, with "The End of Wall Street," of the financial crisis, is the fair man of financial journalism. He... Continue reading
Simon Johnson and James Kwak's "13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown" attempts to sum up what the pair have been arguing for several years now in their popular blog, The Baseline Scenario, and (mostly Johnson)... Continue reading
How do you account for Michael Lewis' great success? Beginning with "Liar's Poker," and continuing with books like "Moneyball" and "The Blind Side" and now with "The Big Short," Lewis defies easy categorization: He has mastered a sort of amiable,... Continue reading
Judge Richard Posner must be an impressively fast typist. This is not a criticism of his prose style, which is usually clear and straightforward, or his thinking, which involves a judicious process of weighing and discriminating. It's a fact. Books... Continue reading
Henry Paulson isn't the only Goldman, Sachs & Co. veteran with a book about the travails of Wall Street (see a review of Paulson's "On the Brink" here). Roy Smith, a former Goldman partner who went limited in the late... Continue reading
Like Andrew Ross Sorkin in "Too Big to Fail" or David Wessel in "In Fed We Trust," Henry Paulson Jr. force-marches us through one crisis after another in the recently published "On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the... Continue reading
Andrew Ross Sorkin's "Too Big to Fail" is a big, ambitious book that tries to establish by sheer accumulation of detail and anecdote primacy to explain what exactly happened during the crisis-wracked months of 2008. Sorkin offers critics lots of... Continue reading
Greg Zuckerman, The Wall Street Journal's hedge fund reporter, adds another volume to to the growing stack of tomes on the financial crisis -- a phenomenon that's beginning to resemble its own bubble. The worst thing I can say about... Continue reading
Robert Skidelsky's "Keynes: The Return of the Master" hit the stores in the last week and seems certain to further turn up the heat in an economics profession engaged in soul-searching and a re-examination of fundamental principles. Skidelsky, of course,... Continue reading
Anyone who has ever covered banking knows the line that the bank to short is the one run by last year's Banker of the Year. Awards and praise get heaped up for earnings growth and share appreciation. And the very... Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel's "In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic" is just out to the usual accompanying publicity. It's a very pleasant read, written in that WSJ style adapted to books that hit... Continue reading
The memories and the macabre anniversary of Lehman Brothers' collapse are slipping away, but it's worth noting a final (for now) entry in the discussion: Joseph Tibman's just released "The Murder of Lehman Brothers: An Insider's Look at the Global... Continue reading
I've officially finished Lawrence McDonald and Patrick Robinson's "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers." The title is accurate: It is an inside story in that it's told almost completely, in almost... Continue reading
I've just begun reading Lawrence McDonald and Patrick Robinson's "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers." McDonald was a midlevel trader at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. for four years, and Robinson, who... Continue reading
Justin Fox's book, "The Myth of the Rational Market" has been reviewed widely and received, in the main, good notices. Indeed, it's a pleasant read through some pretty forbidding material, though by necessity there's quite a bit of overlap with... Continue reading
The indefatigable Richard Posner's compact guide to the apocalypse -- "A Failure of Capitalism" -- has gotten attention lately, which he's kept alive with steady blogging. Much of the conversation around the book centers on how Posner, a federal judge... Continue reading
