What type of stories would I cover if I were a financial journalist? A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times had an interview with William Clay Ford Jr., “perhaps the most seasoned auto executive in Detroit.” He has more than 30 years on the job at Ford Motor Company which was founded by …
This past Tuesday, The New York Times was plugging the new book by its “merger and acquisition correspondent”, Andrew Ross Sorkin, big time. The book is called, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Washington and Wall Street Fought to Save the Financial System – and Themselves. That long and yet empty title …
If you did not recognize the style of Death of a Deal Man, you do not know John Das Passos. If you are an American, that is doubly unacceptable. His is the only name you can utter when an anti-American foreigner claims that your country has not produced a single writer or artist of international …
I had never heard of Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom until they won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics this past week. So, what I know about their work is what I read in the papers. But that is sufficient; somewhere in this blog I wrote that everything you need to know is always right …
A never-ending subject of thoughtful deliberation among economic and finance professors is the relation between the “Wall Street” and the “real economy” – whether the woes in the realm of finance spill over to the “real economy”. You can see why the simple question remains an impossible puzzle. The very first step in answering it …
Bruce ‘Bid’em-Up’ Wasserstein was born a deal maker. He was born in Brooklyn, went to the University of Michigan, studied business and law at Harvard, did a stint at Cambridge, became a Knox Fellow and authored a book, but his true love was deal making. He was called smart, driven, a chess player, a strategist, …
In a perceptive line in The Critique of Dialectical Reasoning, Jean Paul Sartre writes that “the future comes to man through things in so far as it previously came to things through man.” The idea is not new, but Sartre expresses it more eloquently than others. What he is saying is that, in the course …
Financial Regulation, Theoretical Poverty (2 of 2) Read More »
One of the issues being debated these days is the regulation of over-the-counter derivatives, the privately negotiated, customized contracts that exist in a legal world parallel to their standardized, exchange-traded cousins. The Financial Times was surprised that even the European industrial companies had come out against the regulation: Some of Europe’s industrial companies have warned …
Financial Regulation, Theoretical Poverty (1 of 2) Read More »
So, what rules did Bernanke break when he tossed out the rule book? Here is a story about the reduction in the Treasury’s Supplemental Financing Program that no one probably read because the few who understood it did not have to read it and the rest would not get it. According to Bloomberg: The U.S. …
It is the anniversary of Lehman’s demise and everyone is looking back for “lessons learned”. The passage of time has not helped. The usual nonsense about greed, bad management, etc. is being regurgitated, with a new spin making the rounds: that Lehman’s demise prevented even bigger collapses. Goldman’s Blankfein was first to float this nonsense. …