Not Biting the Hand That Feeds Them: Academe’s Deafening Silence on Runaway Pay “Yale President Richard Levin could have been in investment banking, he could have been in venture capital, he could have run a corporation. Obviously, if he’d gone into other fields, the compensation would be orders of magnitude greater.” –John Pepper, Yale compensation committee;...Read More
Crime and No Punishment “The Jungle,” by Upton Sinclair. “Silent Spring,” by Rachel Carson. “Unsafe at Any Speed,” by Ralph Nader. To this illustrious list of muckraking, epoch-changing books, add one more: Charles Ferguson’s “Predator Nation.” Pantheon of Greats Essentially the unabridged companion piece to his 2010 Oscar-winning documentary (“Inside Job“), the book is a sober if...Read More
Unabridged and Cliff’s Notes People who know my background and views frequently ask me what I recommend to someone who wants to learn more about “the current (financial) unpleasantness.” Besides this blog, that is. 🙂 My response: “how much time do you have?” From most-to-least time-consuming, here are my recommendations. A weekend: Michael Lewis’ fabulous...Read More
Michael Lewis Was Right Today’s lead financial news story appears to be the just-released U.S. Senate report on the financial crisis (formal title of the 650-page report, “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse”). Not much new news, at least as far as I can tell: the mind-boggling greed and skulduggery of...Read More
See . . This . . Movie Calling Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job” a documentary is like calling The Gettysburg Address a speech. Bar none, it is the clearest, most succinct explanation of the Wall Street-engineered financial crash — whose aftermath we are still very much dealing with — that I have seen. More than a...Read More
