I’m a big fan of Zipcar for many reasons, among which the least-discussed is that it lets me never worry about car maintenance. I’m one of those auto n00bs that mechanics love to see come through the door: ignorant, anxious, and trusting. So owning my own car is an ongoing maintenance liability: every “check engine” [...]
David Owen’s recent New Yorker comment, Economy vs. Environment, draws an apt analogy between the mortgage and ecological crises we face. Countless living beings over millennia deposited their saved energy as carbon so that we might burn the resulting coal and oil with less heed than a homeowner on her third subprime equity loan. When [...]
The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney asks, “Where would an Obama Library make most sense: Hawaii? Kansas?”
The answer, obviously, is cyberspace. As our first Web-savvy President, Barack Obama should put his Presidential Library online. If his Transparency and Open Government Initiative succeeds, most of the Library will already be built by the end of his term. [...]
Arthur C. Clarke’s third law reads: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What’s the difference between technology and magic? As this blog post points out, “magic” is the halting of inquiry. With that formulation, it’s possible that science can paradoxically plunge us into a second Dark Ages, when the world around us are [...]
As a matter of public relations, no one has ever gone wrong blaming financial disasters on “greed.” But we all know that greed is the basic engine of capitalism. Greed may not be “good,” but it’s there, and we rely on it to power our modern economy. So the problem isn’t greed: greed, like the [...]
Conservative think-tank dead-enders keep insisting that the blame for the market and financial crisis lays at the feet of do-gooder efforts at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, all the way back to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, to help more Americans buy homes. I have never believed in the virtue of home ownership. But [...]
Total economic meltdown sure is confusing, isn’t it?
So where to turn for helpful information? Well, the sense I’m getting is: while many experts know and agree on what’s happening (collapse of mortgages and mortgage-backed derivatives, collapse of other lines of credit, credit crunch across the board), we are in uncharted territory as far as what [...]
A few days ago I discussed how Treasury Secretary Paulson came to the negotiation with an extreme, highly “anchored” opening move, and how negotiations research shows that anchoring works. Why, then, don’t we always use absurd opening moves when engaging in a negotiation over used cars or other purchases? The answer is that the party [...]
The Obama campaign has a unique opportunity to show us what leadership in his Internet-savvy administration might look like. Americans are panicking now over the crisis on Wall Street, panicking but completely at a loss as to what we should do. This is Obama’s chance to show us real leadership through running a serious of [...]
This week’s Economist describes a difficult negotiation underway in Washington:
An impaired mortgage security might yield 65 cents on the dollar if held to maturity. But because the market is so illiquid and suspicion about mortgage values so high, it might fetch just 35 cents in the market today. Recapitalising banks would mean paying as close [...]
