Today at 11am, Chrystia will interview Alan Simpson live on YouTube. She and the former senator will discuss the Obama administration’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year as well as his new memoir, Shooting from the Lip: The Life of Senator Al Simpson. You can watch the whole thing here:
In an age of rising income inequality, one of the big questions is what impact the growing gap will have on democracy. Francis Fukuyama worries about it in this month’s Foreign Affairs, in an essay that bears the worrying subtitle, “Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?” President Barack Obama, as he signaled again with his budget this week, is putting the issue at the center of his re-election campaign.
The powerful connection between money and politics is also on vivid display in the roller-coaster Republican race, where Rick Santorum owes his surge in part to the generosity of the Wyoming multimillionaire Foster Friess, whose “super PAC” helped keep Santorum’s candidacy alive by running TV ads on his behalf.
I interviewed Friess a few days ago, before he made his headline-grabbing remark about women using aspirin as contraceptives in his earlier days (“The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”) He’s a folksy, white-haired, septuagenarian charmer whose Web site features a photo of him astride a horse and “Foster’s Campfire Blog.” He also has unequivocal views about the proper relationships among the wealthy, the state and politics.
If you want to get a finger-tip feel for one of the most important transformations in our world today, read The Fear Index, Robert Harris’s new thriller.
Harris has been widely praised for his adept portrayal of the hedge fund universe in which his novel is set. “The greatest pleasure of this book is that it gets the finance right,” cooed Felix Salmon, the Reuters finance blogger whose keyboard often oozes acid.
He is right that Harris’s hedgies are a welcome and realistic departure from the Masters of the Universe of most popular fiction. For one thing, these are the alpha geeks, the nerdy doctorate-holders whose testosterone is channeled into equations instead of frat-house swagger.
Mitt Romney’s thumping victory in the Florida primary this week is bringing us closer to a Romney-Obama face-off in the autumn. While we do not know for sure if Romney will clinch the Republican nomination, if he does, we can already say what the central question in November will be: Is the United States one nation under God, or has it become a country where the government needs to secure a better deal for the 99 percent?
We know Romney’s view. In a television interview last month, he explained: “When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent — and those people who have been most successful will be in the 1 percent — you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”
Meanwhile, in his State of the Union address, the president opted explicitly for the 99 percent perspective. Restoring their fortunes is “the defining issue of our time,” he said. “No challenge is more urgent. No debate more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”
In an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney tells Chrystia that the implementation of the Volcker Rule in the U.S. will have unintended consequences in the international bond markets and that JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon is wrong to say that the Basel Committee’s decision to increase capital requirements is “anti-American.”
DAVOS, Switzerland–George Soros is a traitor to his class. That’s not an insult or a tabloid exaggeration. It is, instead, a direct quote from my conversation with the billionaire investor and philanthropist at the World Economic Forum here.
‘‘I am a traitor to my class,’’ Soros said. ‘‘I think that the income differentials are too wide and ought to be narrowed,’’ he added, which is why he favors a bigger hit on those, like himself, at the very top.
But among his plutocratic peers, he said, that is very much a minority opinion. In fact, Soros, who helped spearhead the muscular Wall Street support for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, particularly among hedge fund and private equity investors, believes the president’s call for higher taxes is the reason he has been ditched by the financiers: ‘‘That has led my hedge fund community to abandon Obama in favor of any Republican, because they don’t like to be taxed.’’
Watch George Soros tell Chrystia why he thinks it will take years for Germany to realize that Europe needs additional stimulus and why he would be loading up on Italian government bonds if he were still an active investor.
Watch as the billionaire investor tells Chrystia why the hedge fund community has abandoned President Obama and why there’s not a huge gap between the views of the president and Republican front-runner Mitt Romney.
Among old Russia hands, the smart thing to say about Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the billionaire who is running for president, is that he is a puppet of the Kremlin. He’s not a real opposition politician, the argument goes, he is merely a liberal-sounding insider who has been given Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s blessing to compete to make the race look more legitimate and to split the liberal vote.
All of this is true. But when I interviewed Prokhorov in Moscow a few days ago, I realized that it missed the most important point — what Prokhorov’s candidacy, and the man himself, tells us about the battle raging today inside the Russian governing elite.
When people take to the streets to challenge their regimes, particularly in societies that had been dismissed as apathetic, the most exciting story is the protesters. Many of them are fresh faces, and they can be painted in the idealistic colors of the outsider.
As you may have heard, Chrystia has a new talk show on YouTube called the Freeland File. Each week, Chrystia and her guest roster of marquee policymakers, business leaders and thinkers will be providing commentary and analysis that illuminate the world’s most pressing issues.
Thanks to a Christmas miracle, Chrystia’s Russian visa arrived in time for her to travel to Moscow and interview Mikhail Prokhorov for the Freeland File’s debut episode. In the three clips below, watch as the Russian billionaire and presidential candidate tells Chrystia why he would be a better leader than Vladimir Putin; how his political career started with his 2007 arrest over a prostitution ring in France; and what he plans to do with his NBA team if he wins the election in March.
