Phil Falcone has a theory about Goldman Sachs.
There was a striking Bloomberg item by Katherine Burton today about the billionaire hedge fund manager, who calls the former Guccione Mansion home and has the most splendiferous wife in the business. She reported that Goldman is pulling its entire $120 million from Read More
A long line of fans formed around the stage at Cooper Union to have Slavoj Zizek sign books. They rattled off their names for the philosopher’s dedication.
“Ian,” said one.
“Like the writer,” said Mr. Zizek, “McEwan.”
“Kelvin,” said another.
“Like the stupid temperature.”
“Austin,” said a third.
“Like Texas.”
“Anna,” said a fourth, “with Read More
A generation or two after America split from Britain, Americans got nostalgic. “English country house” décor became the rage, and, for wealthy Americans, that meant a “longcase” clock. They were also called “tallcases” until a popular 1870s song, “My Grandfather’s Clock,” gave them their current colloquial name.
On Nov. 18, two 19th-century grandfather clocks will Read More
Wall Street executives like calling boardroom intrigue Shakespearean, but it isn’t. Motives are knotty in Shakespeare’s tragedies; psyches are scrambled, and even ravenousness gets convoluted. Banking is purer. There is allegiance, betrayal, revenge, failure, power and money.
So while it might have seemed that something intricate and theatrical must have happened last week, when JPMorgan’s Read More
There is something unpleasant but human about wishing a serious amount of ill on significant villains, or chuckling when they suffer. Stories claimed last year, for example, that Bernie Madoff was dying of cancer, which he wasn’t, and then that he was badly injured by either a fall out of bed or an Read More
It’s barely been 24 hours since Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announced, as expected, that he’s putting $600 billion into the American banking system, aid that’s called quantitative easing (or “QE 2″ if you’re really with it). But Mr. Bernanke, sadly, has been taking it from all sides lately: the left, the right, Read More
Outside of a few elections here and there, the most important thing that happened to the United States of America yesterday was the release of Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia, a book-length version of his iconic Goldman-Sachs-as-vampire-squid Rolling Stone extravaganza. (The secret AIG book was big, too.) Mr. Taibbi, whom The Observer interviewed for a Read More
