The dual mandate of the Federal Reserve is a good one. It is charged with ensuring stable prices and maximum employment. That’s a good basic recipe, one which served the country well. And notice what isn’t there. The Fed is not charged with distorting natural market pricing mechanisms to the point of perverting risk. It [...]

Here’s a piece of recent news that you almost certainly missed: A large consumer products company, Johnson & Johnson, announced a one-off loss owing to a 32 percent currency devaluation in Venezuela. The reason I expect you missed that less-than-seismic piece of news is that, unless you happen to be particularly fascinated in Johnson & [...]

Obama’s an accomplished individual. Smart, cool, in control. But his standout quality is probably his ability to create euphoria. Create it, sustain it, ride it. Watch the people celebrating with him at his victory rally in Chicago and you could easily believe that the USA had just won a war or beaten a recession. Unfortunately for [...]

There’s a lot of talk about Europe at the moment, but it’s kind of the way you talk about flooding when the waters don’t reach your house. Sure, it must be real tough for the poor saps whose couches are bobbing around in their living rooms — but meantime, what’s for dinner? Unfortunately, that European [...]

Barack Obama was recently on the stump, defending the latest set of lackluster jobs figures. Obama blamed ‘serious headwinds’ including higher gas prices and, more recently, the developing crisis in the Eurozone. Having handed much of the blame to foreign oilfields and European crises, he returned to more familiar ground, bashing a Republican-controlled House for blocking some of the proposals in [...]

About four weeks ago, I wrote on my blog that Facebook was heading for a ridiculous valuation when it was launched on the stockmarket. That wasn’t because I think it’s a bad company – pretty clearly a company that makes a billion dollars in profits after only a few years of life is a remarkable [...]

      Facebook is a phenomenal company. Mark Zuckerberg is a remarkable man and an astonishing entrepreneur. He’s created something sensational — something genuinely world-changing — and he’s young enough to be my son. But Facebook the company is one thing. The mooted valuation of Facebook is quite another. I admire the first, and [...]

Doing God’s Work: Can you spot the difference?  It’s OK for firms to make money. That’s what they’re there to do. But real firms, durable ones, the ones who care about their reputation, their future, and the generations that come after, have figured out that you need to take care of yourself by taking care [...]

The financial turmoil of recent years has produced an outpouring of op-eds, news stories, books and essays seeking to document and analyze the unfolding disaster. Some of the material has been written by insiders, some by those from the outside. Some by experts, some by astonished laypeople. It’s a mass of material which can, remarkably, [...]

Ah, don’t you just love traditions? Hollowing out a pumpkin for halloween. Sitting down to turkey for Thanksgiving. Seeing family and friends around the winter holiday season. And Goldman’s the same. It’s a traditional sort. Once it’s got into a habit – excessive leverage, taking huge risks and disguising them, helping to bankrupt Western capitalism, [...]