Sweet Music To Soothe The Savage Banker

September 16, 2011

All together now: “There Will Never Be Another Lehman.”

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A Stock Exchange Needs More Than A Big Tree

February 22, 2011

On May 17, 1792, 24 stock brokers met under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street. Lower Manhattan has been a center of financial activity ever since, and the swells of suited stockbrokers on those streets at lunchtime have come to seem inevitable. Soon, however, the people in charge of the Big Board may be at a new address: Neue Börsenstraße 1, 60487 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Germany’s Deutsche Boerse Group …

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Where Will Tomorrow’s Workers Come From?

February 18, 2011

With the unemployment rate still coming down from its double-digit heights, few people in the U.S. are talking about what may be one of the biggest economic problems in our future: a labor shortage. In fact, however, one of the main reasons the unemployment rate has fallen faster than many analysts predicted is that the number of people seeking work has declined. Bloomberg recently reported that overall participation in the …

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The Euro Lifeboat

December 2, 2010

Citizens of Germany, Greece and Ireland are all learning an important lesson: When you share a lifeboat with someone, you can’t each go your own way. Germany is the biggest contributor to the $113 billion bailout that the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund cobbled together for Ireland last weekend. The seven-year package of loans, totaling 85 billion euros at an average interest rate of 5.8 percent, guarantees …

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The Economic Fujiwara

November 22, 2010

The dollar is up against the euro. No, the dollar is down against the euro. Now it’s up again. Until it goes down. Meteorologists have a term, the “Fujiwara effect,” to describe the interaction of two storms in close proximity. In the Northern hemisphere, wind blows counterclockwise around centers of low pressure. When two lows “dance the Fujiwara,” as some scientists put it, the winds of each storm influence the …

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Restoring Confidence In Europe’s Banks

June 25, 2010

The financial crisis that gripped the world in late 2008 was, most of all, a crisis of confidence. What we knew about the condition of America’s biggest financial institutions was bad enough, but what we didn’t know was terrifying. This is why the “stress tests” that financial regulators publicly performed on 19 of the country’s largest financial firms last year were so helpful. In some cases the news was good, …

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Kicking The Umpire Out Of The Game

March 15, 2010

When Greece raised 5 billion euros (nearly $7 billion) in the bond market earlier this month, it had to offer investors an interest rate of 6.25 percent — nearly double what fellow European Union member Germany pays to borrow money. The difference is that the Greek government’s finances are, as we noted here months ago, a train wreck, while Germany is still a good credit risk. The perilous state of …

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Granting Asylum From An Ally

March 12, 2010

Like many before them, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike uprooted their family and moved to the United States, seeking asylum and the freedom to practice their beliefs. But the Romeikes’ situation is unique. They did not come from a country ruled by a repressive, dictatorial regime, but from a modern Western democracy. The German couple appealed to the United States after they faced what a Memphis, Tenn. judge deemed to be …

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How The Cold War Ended, And How It Didn’t End

November 11, 2009

As a young journalist during the last decade of the Cold War, my one ambition that went unfulfilled was to cover Eastern Europe. I was particularly drawn to Germany because it was the front line of the East-West confrontation. It seemed inevitable to me that, one day, Germans would insist on living in a single country again, and the country they would want to live in would be democratic and …

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