Merrill: Your Questions Answered
A very loyal reader writes: Why did O’Neal defenestrate while Cayne at Bear and Prince at Citi have managed to hang on to their jobs? Is a takeover of Merrill realistic, considering the handicaps of...
View ArticleNorthern Rock: The Bidding Heats Up
If Chris Flowers thought he was going to have little competition in his quest to buy Northern Rock, he’s been comprehensively disabused of that notion at this point. The Virgin bid might sound a bit...
View ArticleWhy Magazine Circulations Are Like Credit Ratings
If we’ve learned one thing from the CDO fiasco, it’s that in many cases investment banks put products together with more of an eye on the credit rating they could achieve than they had on real...
View ArticleThe Weakness of Quant Funds
In the wake of the MIT Techonology Review’s two–part story on the summer quant-fund blow-up, there’s a fascinating and high-level debate going on in the blogosphere about whether this marks the End of...
View ArticleTech Money vs Real Money, Photo Edition
The difference between Facebook and The Entity: articles on Facebook (valuation: $15 billion) are illustrated with a pile of $20 bills, while articles on The Entity (valuation: $85 billion plus) are...
View ArticleiPhone question
Sometimes I need to restart my iPhone. No big deal, it’s a computer, computers need to be restarted once in a while. But for some reason, when that happens, all my photos get wiped. Not the songs on...
View ArticleExtra Credit, Tuesday Edition
Economics for Adults: David Warsh on pop-economics books. He really likes this one. How America must handle the falling dollar: Larry Summers on his favorite subject. Brad DeLong responds. Hank Paulson...
View ArticleAmbani Joins Richest Man In World Stakes
The "richest man in the world" stakes are heating up. With Bill Gates seemingly more interested in giving his money away than in accumulating more of it, it seemed inevitable that Mexico’s Carlos Slim...
View ArticleHow the Economist Thrives in the Age of New Media
I’m attending the Future of Business Media conference in Manhattan, and probably the most surprising thing so far is how impressive Susan Clark was, on a panel about business magazines. Clark is the...
View ArticleThe Future of the WSJ
Gordon Crovitz, the publisher of the WSJ, appeared at the Future of Business Media conference and did a reasonably good job of mumbling noncommitally about Dow Jones’s future within News Corp: he...
View ArticleBuffalo: Doomed, or Part of an Economic Powerhouse?
Richard Florida doesn’t explicitly mention Ed Glaeser in his column today in the Toronto Globe & Mail, but it can easily be read as a direct response to Glaeser’s pessimistic view of Buffalo in...
View ArticlePearson Should Sell the Financial Times
On what the news stories all insist on calling the "sidelines" of the Future of Business Media conference I had a very interesting conversation with Ien Cheng, the publisher of FT.com. I told him he...
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Paying Readers Redux
Since I offered to start paying my readers, the emails (to blogonomics@gmail.com) have not exactly been flooding in. This is good for those who asked for high amounts, since I’ve promised to pay the...
View ArticleHow Sowood Went Bust
The WSJ this weekend came out with its post mortem of Sowood Capital, the hedge fund started by former Harvard high-flyer Jeffrey Larson which imploded spectacularly in July. There’s nothing...
View ArticleExtra Credit, Wednesday Edition
Housing wealth isn’t wealth: Have you heard much about the "wealth effect" recently? No? Willem Buiter explains why it might not exist anyway. How Big Is Rhode Island, Anyway? Still Demise-ing: "In a...
View ArticleGDP Report Gives the Fed an Opt-Out From its Rate Cut
The 3.9% growth rate in thrid-quarter GDP is only preliminary, but it is very large, and it does give me a little less certain that the Fed is going to cut rates this afternoon. While housing is indeed...
View ArticleWall Street Bonus Update
As someone who’s personally invested in this year’s Wall Street bonus pool – I have a bottle of Scotch on the line – I was quite happy to turn to page B5A of this morning’s WSJ. (Please, Mr Murdoch,...
View ArticleFinding a New Merrill CEO
As John Carney notes, it’s a little bit weird that Merrill Lynch is now headless – and just as the all-important bonus decisions are being made, too. Why no interim CEO? Carney speculates that no one...
View ArticleInsider Trading at Goldman? Very Unlikely
Did people named Paulson have all the best information about the mortgage crisis this summer? The Paulson Credit Opportunities fund was up 410% as of the end of August (that’s John Paulson), while now...
View ArticleBehind the Zipcar-Flexcar Merger
The two leaders in the car-sharing business, Zipcar and Flexcar, are merging, in what looks very much like an acquisition of the latter by the former: the Flexcar name is disappearing, while the Zipcar...
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