Robert Teitelman

In Tuesday's New York Times, Joe Nocera follows up on some recent commentary from former Bank of America Merrill Lynch executive Sallie Krawcheck about the dangers of financial complexity. Nocera confesses that two years in, he's still "not sure what to think about the darn thing" -- that...

More on the continuing rumble over private equity. Noah Smith defends private equity by arguing that without it, we'd resemble the Japanese, with their entrenched corporations and oppressive, male-dominated salary men corporate lifestyles. Paul Krugman, brandishing charts, insists that private equity increased inequality. Matthew Yglesias

Two New York Times columns offered some pushback to Democratic talking points Tuesday. Andrew Ross Sorkin took aim at the deep belief that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was somehow key to the financial crisis. And David Brooks, following the criticisms and clarifications of Newark Mayor Corey Booker on...

This post originally appeared on TheDeal.com

Over the past few weeks, I've been struck by the sheer amount of play Harvard Business School's Clayton Christensen has been getting. True, Christensen has a new book out, How Will You Measure Your Life? (with James...

The columns, blogs, tweets and sober cud-chewing over the J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. trading debacle continues. What have we learned? Well, not as much as you'd think, given the notion that the Internet is the greatest investigative reporter since Woodward and Bernstein. We know J.P. Morgan made some complex...

Economics these days resemble a large family with a dark secret. Few speak of that secret to outsiders; that would be bad form, and besides, they wouldn't understand. But within the family, in whispers and asides that sometimes erupt into heated argument, tensions rise. Something is fundamentally wrong. This was...

On its front page Monday, The New York Times takes a whack at a trend that shouldn't surprise anyone that has been paying attention: "Stock Trading Is Still Falling After '08 Crash." This is akin to the constantly recycled surprise that this recovery hasn't behaved like every other...

Let's start with the news: This was the week Occupy Wall Street was supposed to shuck its winter coat and restart the global revolution. On May 1, May Day, OWS declared a general strike, which by my count is at least the second general strike called by OWS affiliates (the...

Again, with the central banks. The Financial Times' Martin Wolf leads off Wednesday, with a column reviewing the plight of the central banks. Wolf's column, "After the bonfire of the verities," essentially replays the points made in an FT analysis piece over the weekend, just does it more...

Monday is central banking day. The media is alight with the latest meme, that austerity is dead, along with the prospects of Nicolas Sarkozy. The French president, of course, is trailing socialist François Hollande in the presidential runoff, which is less than a week away; and the French public's apparent...

Let's abandon all pretense of a logical argument today and offer up a bit of blogospheric tourism on au courant topics. Maybe we can make it all work in the end.

The subject of the Pulitzer Prizes has been fly-swatted to death over the past few weeks, offering scant...

On a Wall Street Journal opinion page that has grown as dreary and dogmatic as the old Soviet-era East Germany, Holman Jenkins remains a rare pleasure, a throwback to the old you-never-know-quite-what-they'll-say-conservatism of the late Robert Bartley. Maddening, often enough, but thought provoking and often smart.

On Tuesday, Jenkins...

Last week, Princeton University convened a two-day conference on the European crisis (it was the inaugural conference of something called the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance backed by Princeton alum and founder of hedge fund Canyon Partners Mitch Julis). What's not to like for...

A post earlier in the week about a Gretchen Morgenson column in The New York Times continues to bug me. Morgenson was once again thumping the tub for "say on pay," that is the ability of shareholders to have a greater say on corporate compensation schemes. The big...

For years, it's been a popular pastime to decry the use of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as a colossal, ego-inflating, comp-expanding, waste-of-shareholder-money exercise. Most of these charges are either wildly exaggerated or absurdly simplistic. M&A is a necessary means for companies to grow, particularly in a world so driven by...

Declinism and catastrophe are in the air, like this early spring's hay fever. The New York Times reviewed the Financial Times' Edward Luce new book about American decline, "Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent," over the weekend (I posted on a Luce...

As the political primaries attest, arguing declinism is just about the easiest and most tempting case to make in all of punditry, particularly in the wake of a serious financial crisis. As Stanford Business School's Edward Lazear offered up this week in The Wall Street Journal in a...

Jesse Eisinger at ProPublica, among others, has taken note of the annual report from the Dallas Federal Reserve that goes after the big banks. The title of that essay, by the Dallas Fed's head of research Harvey Rosenblum, is pretty blunt: "Choosing the Road to Prosperity:...

In the Financial Times yesterday, Stein Ringen, a professor of sociology at Oxford, takes a lash to forecasting-happy economists, this time over the eurozone. Ringen believes economists "with remarkable unanimity" got it wrong, while "against the storm stood a remarkable woman, Angela Merkel, insisting no quick fix was...

The encomiums are rolling in for Delaware Chancellor Leo Strine on his El Paso decision, a verbal thrashing of any number of parties in the transaction, notably Goldman, Sachs & Co., for a devil's own brew of conflicts. Strine is once again the It Girl of Delaware. As...