TED talks are well known to policy wonks and geeks. I find many of them quite interesting and have linked to them. But while many people know of them, not so many know that the audience at TED conferences tend to be the well-heeled because it is for members only and the cost of attending can be quite high. [Read more…]

I do not directly trade in stocks although like anyone with a retirement account, someone is trading on the stock market with my savings. My lack of interest may be related to my lack of interest in gambling generally and to my lack of a desire to make more money. I have a job that pays me enough for my needs and that is enough. My main interest in the financial world is more on the macro side, to understand how it impacts the political and social worlds. But the recent global financial turmoil has resulted in me learning more about the world of high finance than I ever wanted. [Read more…]

One of the problems of capitalism (at least I see it as a problem) is that its only fiduciary duty is to the shareholders. In other words, its business practices have to have the prime purpose of maximizing the returns to its investors, consistent with the existing laws. This makes sense, in a narrow way. After all, the shareholders are the ones who provide the money and in any large public company, they will constitute a varied group that has diverse interests. The only thing that they can be guaranteed to have in common is the desire for a good return on their investments. [Read more…]

All those governments in Europe who thought that it was a great idea to combat the recession by imposing drastic austerity measures and balancing their budgets by squeezing the poor, labor, and middle classes are taking well-deserved drubbings. Yesterday, the governments of France and Greece joined that of the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Denmark in getting kicked out of office. [Read more…]

One of the mysteries of governmental responses to the current financial crises in the US and Europe has been the call for more austerity and belt tightening, even at the risk of social turmoil. One would think that the natural tendency for policy makers fighting a depressed economy is for increased government spending to stimulate employment and growth. And yet we hear endless blathering about the importance of balancing budgets and closing deficits, by which is meant cutting social programs that benefit the majority rather than cutting spending on defense or raising taxes on the wealthy. [Read more…]

The deadline for filing taxes is April 17 and so I mailed in my tax returns over the weekend. Yes, I still send in paper returns via snail mail. It is not that I am a Luddite, not entirely anyway. In fact, I wrote my own spreadsheet for taxes many years ago that I update each year to accommodate any changes. All I have to do is input the data and it calculates my federal, state, and local taxes in exactly the same format as the tax forms. I then download the fillable pdf forms from the various government websites and copy the figures from my spreadsheet onto the forms. [Read more…]

Robert Caro is the famed biographer of legendary New York planner Robert Moses and is currently working his way through a multi-volume epic biography of Lyndon Johnson. What connects the two is that both Moses and Johnson were skillful accumulators and wielders of power and this topic fascinates Caro. [Read more…]