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Reuters blog archive
from Breakingviews:
Review: How economics became the hijacked science
By Olaf Storbeck
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
There’s no lack of books on the shortcomings of mainstream economics. “Economists and the Powerful”, by Norbert Haering, a German financial journalist, and Niall Douglas, an Irish IT consultant, stands out from the crowd.
The authors do not only describe the dismal science’s many flaws; they try to explain why the discipline went wrong. Their claim is that the field has become the ideological servant of vested interests: “a tool for the powerful to enrich themselves at the expense of others” and a “weapon for achieving U.S. hegemony at the cost of everything else”.
The authors back up this bold claim with a number of examples. They trace how wealthy donors streamlined the research agenda of American universities, crowding out redistribution-friendly theories and other topics deemed “socialist”. Subtle financial pressure nurtured a scientific mainstream “strongly biased in favour of negative viewpoints regarding issues like creating quality of opportunity or the role of government and society versus the individual.”
from Breakingviews:
Review: Haiti’s unreconstructed disaster story
It is three years since a massive earthquake devastated Haiti. A new book by Jonathan Katz suggests that the ensuing international aid effort gave the stricken the Caribbean country all possible assistance, short of actual help. He suggests, indeed, that the outsiders did more harm than good.
Haiti’s crisis plucked at the world’s heart strings. Bill Clinton, Sean Penn and Angelina Jolie were among the famous names who stepped up as advocates for the dispossessed. Katz reports that $16.3 billion, much from the United States, was donated. But the effort fell woefully short. “The world came to save Haiti and left behind a disaster”, he writes.
from Breakingviews:
Review: Embracing the psychopath within
By Martin Langfield
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
If you’ve ever thought your boss is a psychopath, you may be right, according to psychologist Kevin Dutton. And if you’re a top-flight markets trader, captain of industry, surgeon or soldier, you may well be one yourself. But that’s OK, says Dutton. It may even be optimal.
from Breakingviews:
Review: Lessons for the poor from English history
By Martin Hutchinson
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
It took England centuries to develop a successful industrial economy. Poor countries today want to recapitulate the process in a few decades. In “The Political Economy of Nation Building” development consultant Mack Ott draws some lessons from the English experience.
from Breakingviews:
Review: Fictional financiers remain elusive
By Peter Thal Larsen
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Banking is fiction’s hidden profession. Despite decades of financial expansion, novelists and playwrights have struggled to imagine a contemporary Shylock or Augustus Melmotte, the shadowy star of Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”. A quarter of a century has passed since Tom Wolfe dreamt up Sherman McCoy, the bond trader who personified the arrogance and greed of an earlier boom in “The Bonfire of the Vanities”. With the crisis wreckage still smouldering, the characters in most contemporary novels are more likely to be found robbing a bank than working for one.
from Breakingviews:
Review: Putting a face on the Kremlin’s autocrat
By Pierre Briançon
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Twelve years after Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin first became president of Russia, we know as little about him as when Boris Yeltsin pulled him from bureaucratic anonymity to make him his last prime minister and successor. And Russians themselves still don’t know: witness both the bizarre popular support he enjoys in parts of the country, and the contemptuous hostility in which he is held by the swelling ranks of his opponents. Is he a Soviet throwback or a Russian moderniser? A statesman or a crook? A closet reformist or a ruthless despot?
from Breakingviews:
Review: Flawed defence of the good of finance
By Edward Hadas
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Financial repression is the theme of the moment, and that’s a slap in the face for Robert J. Shiller, who thinks investors should be protected, not exploited. The possible UK government 100-year fixed coupon bond, which would be issued at an artificially low rate, is almost the antithesis of everything Shiller believes in.
from The Great Debate:
Rumsfeld’s biggest unknown
By Joshua Spivak
The opinions expressed are his own.
The knives are out in Donald Rumsfeld’s new memoir, Known and Unknown. In defense of his long public service career and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the man who was both the youngest and oldest Defense Secretary clearly believes that a good offense is the best strategy.
While the book is receiving press for the intra-cabinet fights and for Rumsfeld cherry-picking his facts, it ends up being a useful and needed work: In eviscerating fellow members of President George W. Bush’s national security team, Rumsfeld raises questions about how the most critical parts of the executive branch operate.
from The Great Debate:
Michael Lewis’ Big Short an unsettling experience
Henry Paulson didn’t see it coming. Nor did Timothy Geithner foresee the meltdown of the financial markets. According to Standard & Poor’s President Deven Sharma, testifying before Congress in the fall of 2008: "Virtually no one – be they homeowners, financial institutions, ratings agencies, regulators, or investors – anticipated what is occurring."
Why? Perhaps "it took a certain kind of person to see the ugly facts and react to them – to discern, in the profile of the beautiful young lady, the face of an old witch," says Michael Lewis, author of numerous best-sellers including 1980s Wall Street memoir Liar’s Poker and now The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W.W. Norton, $27.95).
