Fannie Mae and the limits of public obligation
And still the bills roll in. Taxpayers have already written impressively large cheques for Northern Rock and Bear Stearns. ...
Forget the meltdown, worry about goo and asteroids
Last week was the hundredth anniversary of the Tunguska explosion. If you weren’t celebrating, you should have been. The in...
Metaphors in free fall: now the anti-bubble has a name.
Life has changed for market participants over the last year. More time for reflection, less champagne. I completely underes...
The strange financial physics of the inverse bubble
Some literary journals invite their readers to compete in the invention of new words to describe activities or concepts that have not y...
There is a better way to prevent bank failures
Stuff happens. People make mistakes, parts go wrong, unexpected things crop up. When disaster ensues, politicians, journalists and sava...
Rhetoric will never feed the hungry world
As a small boy I was told I must clean my plate because there were children starving in Africa. I answered back, as small boys do...
Smoking, cynicism and sheer muddled thinking
I had always thought that the argument ‘the government doesn’t want us to stop smoking because it collects so much revenue in tax’ was ...
Business books: the good, the bad and the cheesy
The FT, with Goldman Sachs, has just launched its annual business book competition. So the editor raised the question: what makes...
Seeing is believing when it comes to inflation
According to the official figures released last week, the consumer price index increased by 3% over the previous twelve months. I...
Darwin’s marriage and war in Iraq: the missing link
The University of Cambridge has put online the complete works of Charles Darwin. Not just the Origin of Species, but his personal...