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“We continue to listen to the same people whose errors in judgment were central to the problem,” said John Reed, 71, a former co-chief executive officer of Citigroup Inc., who estimated only 25 percent of needed changes have been enacted. “I’m astounded because we basically dropped the world’s biggest economy because of an error in […]

Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless. “I asked him how he and his co-workers felt about making loads of money when much of the country was struggling. ‘A lot of people don’t care about it or think about it,’ he replied. ‘They say, it’s a market, it’s still open, and I’ll sell […]

Edgar Allan Poe and the economy of horror.

This was our third interview about the economy, the first two occurring during last year’s campaign. And while the setting was decidedly more formal this time — the Oval Office — the interview felt as conversational as those earlier ones. We sat at the far end of the office from his desk and spoke for […]

It’s not just erratic gas prices and a bad economy that’s hurting automakers. It may be that Americans are changing.

Why does Google even need a chief economist? The simplest reason is that the company is an economy unto itself. The ad auction, marinated in that special sauce, is a seething laboratory of fiduciary forensics, with customers ranging from giant multinationals to dorm-room entrepreneurs, all billed by the world’s largest micropayment system.

It was so frustrating. It was early May, 1989 and I was in Tokyo reporting the financial markets for Reuters, fiddling around journalistically with the peak of the Japanese bubble economy. Meanwhile in China, cataclysmic events were unfolding and I wasn’t there. I really wanted to get back to see it and live it.

We are sympathetic to the extraordinary challenge President Obama faces, but if we’ve learned anything at all two years into the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes, it is that a capital-markets system this dependent on public confidence is a shockingly inadequate foundation upon which to rest our economy.

Why fixing the banks will not revive the economy

Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.