I don’t know if people still give Labor Day speeches about the working men and women who built this great land, but there were two articles written about labor today that ought to boil the blood of every working stiff, whether blue collar, white collar, pink collar, no collar, or whatever. First, Paul Krugman continued …
With cold, methodical clairvoyance, Paul Krugman has been chronicling our descent through subprime madness, into recession, into crisis, liquidity trap, and into the green shoots on the other side. He applauded Ben Bernanke‘s firmness and leadership in 2008, and warned very early in 2009 that the stimulus wasn’t large enough to do the job, that …
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, …
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 …
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 …
I wish I felt better about the state of things. I wish that Jim Cramer wasn’t saying we had just averted a Depression, and I wish the New York Post wasn’t reporting that we were 500 trades away from a meltdown, and I wish Chris Dodd and John Boehner weren’t on TV saying that the …