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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
Recently, pundits with a statistical bent and a penchant for the abyss engaged in a parlor game that might go by the name of "Quantifying the Apocalypse." This game regularly occurs at financial firms, albeit in private. But The Economist's... Continue reading
Notions of time in economics are as slippery and as faith-based as campaign commercials. One relevant duration in economic theory seems to be the time required to attain equilibrium. Stand back and let markets clear, my friends, and all will... Continue reading
What are the politics of corporate governance? This has always baffled me. The notion of shareholders as ultimate owners of corporations only fully emerges in that decade of beginnings, the '70s. On one hand, it borrows from one of the... Continue reading
The financial supermarket was declared dead almost upon birth. Sears sold off Discover to its progenitor, Phil Purcell. American Express unloaded what had been Shearson plus Lehman Brothers plus E.F. Hutton, of sainted memory, on Dick Fuld and Sandy Weill.... Continue reading
James Gorman was smoking hot over the attack upon Goldman, Sachs & Co. by an escaping employee. This is interesting because Gorman is CEO of Goldman rival Morgan Stanley. The same day Greg Smith's see-ya column appeared in The New... Continue reading
A few weeks ago, The Economist, that idiosyncratically British "newspaper" with vague ties to the free-trade liberalism of its 19th-century editor, Walter "Lombard Street" Bagehot, confronted America with a shocking charge: We're overregulated. This sent GOP hearts a-beating, at least... Continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg was clearly dropped upon this mortal coil to confuse us about the distinction between public and private. This is giving me a headache, which I will keep to myself since I have neither a Facebook profile nor a... Continue reading
Class, everyone rattle your talking points. True, we hadn't given a stray thought to this subject for years until Newt accused Mitt of pillage and plutocracy. But we know exactly what's wrong with that sweet angle called private equity. Everything.... Continue reading
Hail, Procrustes. Your time has come. Procrustes, for those who have mislaid your Plutarch, was a wayward blacksmith and son of Poseidon, who owned two iron beds, big and small. (I always liked that nifty detail.) When travelers passed by... Continue reading
When the Cold War ended and Francis Fukuyama spun his globe, all he saw were liberal democracies. Monarchies were as anachronistic as swords. Communism was in ruins, and socialism had been absorbed into democratic welfare states. There were despots scattered... Continue reading
What is an intermediary? He is the man (or woman) working the middle. He is neither this nor that; he's the go-between, the arranger, the fixer, the old goat carrying love notes between doomed lovers. He whispers in ears; he... Continue reading
A polemic lashing out at Occupy Wall Street landed like a ninja warrior in my e-mail recently. The very first sentence, "We are Wall Street," hummingly echoes OWS's "We are the 99%." The anonymous author clearly has channeled the Rick... Continue reading
Sashay past Zuccotti Park and the signs bob up and down like puppets. All Debt Is Evil followed by Where's My Bailout? next to End the Fed. A little confused? And the rest of world's not? Several weeks ago, as... Continue reading
We all love a parade. On Broadway, near Wall Street, the sidewalks are embossed with the names of once-famous worthies who motorcaded up the avenue. It's enlightening: Most of them are forgotten, proof how quickly parade fame fades. These days... Continue reading
The skirmishing over capital, part of the larger debate over the role of 'banks,' or rather finance, in modern, global, liberal democratic economies, mirrors the broader dysfunctions of our gang politics. Continue reading
Let's talk focal point and curb appeal. I've learned of these essential elements of modern life by watching real estate agents peddle houses on cable. (No mortgage crisis on HGTV.) Every room requires a focal point -- a chintz sofa,... Continue reading
Summer is the season of sequels, prequels, parodies, takeoffs and cartoon remakes. In short, reruns. In summer, it's apparently impolite to do anything new; everything must be rescued from some decrepit red barn and restored to circulation. This explains our... Continue reading
Holy cow, Mary Jane, hold on to your chinchilla, we're heading into a liquidity crisis! Out of the blue a few weeks ago, Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong realized this and announced it to the world, or at least to... 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
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
It's coming. Men in suits. Men with phones. Men in meetings. Timpani please. HBO's "Too Big to Fail," which I would watch if I had HBO, debuts the day this fine publication hits the streets. I have read every page... Continue reading
Thanks to fine work by the audit committee of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., we have penetrated to the nub of the David Sokol contretemps with Warren Buffett. Sokol, said the committee (actually, to be candid, law firm Munger Tolles, which did... 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
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
Is it me, Mr. Risk, or are disasters visiting us more regularly? The glib answer is: Blame the media. You're spending too much time watching the Weather Channel or YouTube. Or maybe it's just lousy luck: a gigantic earthquake, tsunami... Continue reading
Blame the Brits. In 1942, in the midst of world conflagration, the Brits went squishy. Sir William Beveridge, a member of Churchill's wartime government (he actually worked for Labour Minister Ernest Bevin, who wanted to get rid of him because... Continue reading
The circus has returned: It shows up like woodland mushrooms in the soccer field behind the dump. It'll put fannies on hard seats, at least until Oprah gets geared up. It's a throwback to an age before yesterday, commentary by... Continue reading
Metaphors, like the alien contagion spawning endless movie zombies, have taken over management of our brains. Sputnik? Again? Really: How many Americans under 73 know Sputnik was a useless silver ball booted into orbit by the Soviet Union in the... Continue reading
The circus has returned: It shows up like woodland mushrooms in the soccer field behind the dump. It'll put fannies on hard seats, at least until Oprah gets geared up. It's a throwback to an age before yesterday, commentary by... Continue reading
In the realm of unquestioned truths, the virtues of competition appear unassailable. We may doubt the wisdom of efficient markets, we may wonder at the ability of laissez-faire markets to avoid breakdown, dysfunction, crashes, panics, palsies, disaster. We may scoff... Continue reading
Morality is as simple as day and night, light and dark, good and evil. You may not be able to offer up a universal definition of morality, but it's obvious. I'll give it to you straight as a ruler: There... Continue reading
There are markets and electorates; there is price discovery and voting. Different? The same? Both practices are techniques for revealing sentiment. Hammering the keyboard to buy or sell shares, jamming a paper ballot into a scanner, are both methods for... Continue reading
When competitiveness was last heard from, it was recessionary 1992, and Bill Clinton was hustling his way to the White House. The competitiveness debate was a tangled ball of string leading to other issues, like the belief that America was heading the way of the British Empire; that Japan, with its favorable balance of trade, was threatening; that an increasingly transactional Wall Street, featuring hostile M&A and leveraged buyouts, had turned CEOs into short-term punters. Continue reading
The big vs. small finance debate. Continue reading
Why is a White House housecleaning of economists so regular? Continue reading
Oh no, not Lehman again. Not Dick Fuld, the grumpiest man alive. Not Hank Paulson, a very large William Hurt-like figure explaining, in strangled tones, failure and inaction. Not the emollient of Ben Bernanke, who may eventually have a future... Continue reading
We've moved. Readers fascinated by arcane information, or eager to complain, can find the new address by squinting at the tiny print at the bottom of the page. The rest of you can take my word. For a decade, world... Continue reading
Austerity, class, is the NIMBY of virtues. Everyone believes in balanced budgets, fiscal discipline, monetary rectitude, with regular doses of anti-consumption cod liver oil to clean out your insides, but of course no one really believes they personally are the problem. Continue reading
The art of forgetting is a key factor in the secret formula for cyclicality. Continue reading
