Being Ben Bernanke

Binyamin Appelbaum profiles the most powerful man in the world, economically speaking, in the New York Times: SHORTLY before Ben S. Bernanke was nominated as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2005, he paid a return visit to Stanford, where he started his academic career in 1979. In a speech, he recalled that he and…

Some recent mentions

This week I was live on air when the Nasdaq froze, ended up spending most of the afternoon helping to diseminate information as it came out from exchange officials and my trader friends from around The Street. I also got quoted a bunch on the story, which turned out to be a non-event given the…

This Week on TRB

Here were the most read posts on TRB this week, in case you missed them: A Field Guide to Stock Market Corrections Americans don’t know anything about interest rates and portfolios Ack on the Attack Nostalgic Bulls Failure to Communicate  

Exit Sandman

This is very big news, Steve Ballmer is one of the last holdout CEOs of the old tech cohort and perhaps the worst one in terms of missing every single major shift and trend over the last thirteen years. Microsoft is in both the Dow and is a large weighting in the S&P 500, so…

Failure to Communicate

I am really good at communicating. I know what I want to get across and exactly how to get it across to different intended audiences. I’m pretty bad at a lot of things but I’m really good at this particular thing, and sometimes I take it for granted. I also get exasperated when I see…

Brad DeLong: What the hell is the Fed thinking?

Do conditions warrant anything more from the Fed’s efforts to tamp down on excess speculation besides a bit of jawboning? An emerging consensus is looking at the recent economic data and scratching its head – what does the Fed see that has them even thinking about tapering? Here’s wonky econoblogger Brad DeLong: There are no…