Forgive me for being slow on the uptake, but the inimitable Louden Wainwright III has written a song called The Paul Krugman Blues. It’s very droll: “When Paul goes on The NewsHour to talk to old Jim Lehrer/ He looks so sad and crestfallen it’s more than I can bear/ And all the other experts …
Five years ago when I was at Jungle magazine, Ryan D’Agostino and I had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Cramer, who at the time was merely a smart, shrewd, excitable market commentator on CNBC, and not the self-caricaturing mad man of Mad Money. I had admired his memoir of his days as a hedge-fund operator, …
In Britain, Borders UK has gone into administration, as they call bankruptcy, and the other big chains, most notably Waterstone’s, are not asking for whom the bell tolls. Meanwhile, in the US, both Borders and Barnes & Noble both posted quarterly losses, and, according to the AP, both “forecast a difficult holiday season, saying competition …
In New York, the rich are part of the landscape. One doesn’t pay too much attention to their excesses; in fact, it provides a little vicarious joy. You might think that seeing them leave the Park Avenue buildings where you’ll never live to enter the limo you’ll never ride in to go to the restaurant …
A speaking tour that took Paul Krugman from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Westchester Community College brought him yesterday to the New York Times Center opposite the McDonald’s on West 41st Street, for a “Sunday with the Magazine’’ interview with assistant managing editor Gerald Marzorati. In front of a packed house of several hundred …
Although every year April brings the start of baseball season and tax season, this year the two events seem more commingled than coincidental. In New York, two new taxpayer-subsidized stadiums are opening. One, the home of the New York Mets, is Citi Field, Citicorp having bought the naming rights back before the crash, when its …
In his fascinating new book Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Liaquat Ahamed pulls off the rare accomplishment of looking into a lost world and finding lessons for our own. Lords of Finance focuses on the central bankers who oversaw the economies of the world’s four most important powers in the days …
The question of the day is: is Barack Obama as cool and as shrewd as Jurgen Prochnow? Or, to be more precise, as Capt.-Lt. Henrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, the character Prochnow played in the 1982 German submarine classic Das Boot. Escaping from Allied destroyers, the captain took his submarine lower and lower into the sea. As they …