This whole spectacle of the health of the global economy pirouetting on the decision of an American Banker, or perhaps more properly, the Viceroy of Wall Street, on whether to symbolically raise a benchmark interest rate, tied to an avalanche of internationally distributed paper claim checks for conceptual ephemera and political promises, must be one…
Elizabeth Warren Among the people who noticed that something was wrong with how banks were issuing credit before the financial crisis was a Harvard professor called Elizabeth Warren.Her prescience helped to propel her from obscurity to Congress, where she is now the senior senator for Massachusetts. Politics occasionally provides openings for youthful candidates…
Earlier this month, attorney James Kidney, who was retiring from the Securities and Exchange Commission, gave a widely reported speech at his retirement party. He said that his bosses were too, quote, “tentative and fearful” to hold Wall Street accountable for the 2008 economic meltdown. Kidney, who joined…
Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives What Galileo has to do with the economy, or how Wall Street is molding your taste in art. “The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are how we make sense of the…
Understanding the Occupy Wall Street movement: A primer Occupy Wall Street, the amorphous series of demonstrations that are reshaping the political debate in many major American cities and in countries around the globe, entered its second month on Monday. Here is a primer to understanding the movement that has mobilized hundreds of thousands of people…
FROM Seattle to Sydney, protesters have taken to the streets. Whether they are inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York or by the indignados in Madrid, they burn with dissatisfaction about the state of the economy, about the unfair way that the poor are paying for the sins of rich bankers,…
The Global Economic Crisis Has Only Just Begun After an ineffective weekend flurry of phone calls among world leaders, confidence in governments’ ability to react is eroding. And the uglier it gets, the more politicians will focus on their own skin rather than finding a common solution. Buckle up. MUNICH – This was the…
Traders at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in Germany, whose owner is negotiating to purchase the New York Stock Exchange.