Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Only Alan Blinder, once a Fed vice chairman and a former Princeton colleague of Bernanke’s, defended the Fed. Blinder told this tale:
Andrew Ross Sorkin • Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the FinancialSystem--and Themselves
Error
federalreserve.govDrawing a parallel between the US Forest Service and Federal Reserve is irresistible. The Fed was created less than a decade after its environmental counterpart. By the 1920s the Fed was attempting to suppress the business cycle. While ‘federal fire suppression acts to subsidize developments of private lands in fire-prone areas’, the Fed’s policy o
... See moreEdward Chancellor • The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
The Bob Rubin trade? Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, one of those who sign their names on the banknote you just used to pay for coffee, collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he
... See moreNassim Nicholas Taleb • Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch are three of the others, and they have had almost all the market share; S&P and Moody’s each rated almost 97 percent of the CDOs that were issued prior to the financial collapse.24 One reason that S&P and Moody’s enjoyed such a dominant market presence is simply that they had been a part of the club for a long ti
... See moreNate Silver • The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't
