THE RABBLE HIT BACK!
Angry over tuition increases, protesters in London trashed the limo in which Prince Charles and his wife Camilla are riding yesterday.
The Economy
INSIDE JOB
After reading Michael Perino‘s The Hellhound of Wall Street, I was wondering if we would ever see the likes of a Ferdinand Pecora who would explicate the figures and practices behind the financial crisis of 2008 as well as Pecora, the Manhattan prosecutor, did during the Depression for the Crash of 1929. Well, opportunities for …
A SMALLER HAMMER?
Cut defense spending, says Eugene Robinson in this morning’s Washington Post. “The United States accounts for 46.5 percent of the world’s total defense spending,” he writes. “The next-biggest spender is China, which has undertaken an immense buildup to become a military as well as economic superpower – yet accounts for just 6.6 percent of the …
THE HELLHOUND OF WALL STREET
In The Hellhound of Wall Street, Michael Perino has just published an excellent account of the Pecora Hearings, the shorthand name given to the hearings of the Senate Banking Committe in February 1933, during the waning moments of the Hoover administration. The hearings were named not for the committee chairman, the well-motivated but less-than-charismatic chairman …
WHAT GERMANY SEES
There is no shortage of self-analysis about America’s position, insightful and otherwise, especially this week. Sometimes the views of other can offer an altogether helathful shock. The German news magazine Der Spiegel this week offers a lengthy cover story called “A Superpower in Decline: Is the American Dream Over?” Some of their observations: “The fall …
THE CLASS WAR WE WANT AND NEED
On the heels of last night’s big Republican wins in the midterm elections (control of the House, several more Senate seats, a whole bunch of governorships and state legislatures), there is a kind of reasoning going on this morning that follows this line: people didn’t like the health care bill, therefore they didn’t like big …
LISTEN TO SPITZER
At the start of the financial crisis in 2007, my friend Chris Napolitano noted that the from the public’s point of view, the Indispensable Man had taken himself out of the battle. He was talking about Eliot Spitzer, whose work as Attorney General in exposing misdeeds on Wall Street certainly had certainly positioned him as …
PRIVACY ISN’T DEAD, JUST MISPLACED
Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent article in Slate about the changing nature of privacy. There’s less for you and me, and more for corporations and groups. “Once upon a time,” she writes, “you had to be a person to assert a right to personal privacy. But more and more it seems that the demand for …
SHOCKING PROPOSAL: TIE RISK TO REWARD!
Writing on the op-ed page of The New York Times, William D. Cohan, author of House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, the very informative and often shocking account of the collapse of Bear Stearns, has written one of the sharpest, most succinct, most lucid articles on reforming the …
THE EQUALITY MYTH
The above chart is from a paper by Michael Norton of Harvard and Dan Ariely of Duke (the author of Predictably Irrational whom I had the privilege of interviewing in January 2009). Ariely does incredible work showing the difference between the way things are and the way we perceive them to be, and he and …