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I’m reading the long New York Times piece on Citbank’s demise. Deep into it there’s this paragraph:
<<To make matters worse, Citigroup’s risk models never accounted for the possibility of a national housing downturn, this person said, and the prospect that millions of homeowners could default on their mortgages. Such a downturn did come, of [...]
Filed under: Culture, Economics, Uncategorized
Happened to surf by Oliver Stone’s “JFK” last night and stuck with it. I had seen the movie when it came out, even wrote a NY Post column about it — have no idea what I said. But in 1991 I was a good deal less inclined to credit the possibility of [...]
Filed under: Courts, Events, Uncategorized
Reading Edmund Wilson’s diaries, “The Thirties”. EW’s notes from his visit to Ford in 1931, for an article that appeared in The New Republic. He’s talking to a Ford exec, who “ran down the Chevrolet people, Chevrolet being then Ford’s rival. Did we know what went on in the Chevrolet offices? [...]
Filed under: Culture, Uncategorized
Via Global Dashboard:
Filed under: Uncategorized
One might recall the remora from high school biology, a highly specialized fish that has a sucker on the top of its head that enables it to attach itself to sharks and feed on the leftovers after the host has dined. I don’t know if anyone has ever compared the neoconservatives to remoras, but their [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Uncategorized
Over at NPR.org, I have a “Dear Mr. President” piece up telling Obama that I didn’t vote for him (I ended up writing in Wendell Berry), but he could make conservatives like me very happy indeed if he would make some substantive steps toward reforming federal food policy. He should have Berry, Michael Pollan and [...]
“It kind of sticks out there like a sore thumb”
— Paul Light, NYU professor, on the questions regarding gun ownership being put to potential Obama appointees.
Read more
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I haven’t read yet the Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World that was issued by the National Intelligence Council. But if this is an exercise in futurology, it had to be prepared in 2003, before the U.S. had experienced several geopolitical (Iraq; Afghanistan; Iran; North Korea) and geoeconomic (the current financial crisis) setbacks, because many of [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy
Who killed the U.S. auto industry?
To hear the media tell it, arrogant corporate chiefs failed to foresee the demand for small, fuel-efficient cars and made gas-guzzling road-hog SUV’s no one wanted, while the clever, far-sighted Japanese, Germans, and Koreans prepared and built for the future.
I dissent. What killed Detroit was Washington, the government of the [...]
Devils Night was the way Halloween was described in Detroit back in the 1980s when arsonists torced abandoned properties. Twenty years later the bonfire of the inanities returns to Motor City as Republicans begin the process of taking the “Mo” out of ”Motown”.
So people are holding it against the execs of the Big Three because they all flew their Lear [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized