Now it gets interesting. With the recovery at least beginning, European and now British regulators are clearly leaning toward a more competitive banking system with smaller players. The European Commission's Neelie Kroes' decision to break up ING Group NV (NYSE:ING) was the first major substantive move, but that was followed...

Mark Thoma over at The Economist's View last week wrote a short essay that was long on good sense. He commented on a Simon Johnson post that in turn thrashed a Chamber of Commerce attack on the proposed consumer protection agency as bad for small business. Knowing that tangled thread...

We do deals. Bruce Wasserstein did deals, a lot of them, in a career that's already being called "legendary." But for the most part, we didn't see this "artist" of M&A at work; instead, the Bruce we knew was an enthusiast of the media and for journalism. It's been said...

The excerpt from Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail is now on the newsstands in the new issue of Vanity Fair. Because it's an excerpt, it's a little hard to tell how much it reflects the book. Like James Stewart's detailed chronology of the Lehman Brothers Holdings...

The papers Tuesday seem to disagree about exactly where we are. The New York Times led off by Andrew Ross Sorkin's front page column declaring mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and optimism back, and buttressed by the business section's pumping for Dow 10,000, jostles uneasily with the Financial Times, where...

Tired of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.? Weary of turgid, dutiful recapitulations of events from last year? Everyone is doing it (hell, I did one in a column in last week's The Deal magazine), and it might be palatable if anyone really had anything new to say about Lehman, Merrill...

On Saturday, The Baseline Scenario's Simon Johnson returned to the question of modern finance and financial innovation. Johnson's original post last week presented the thesis that finance has grown too large and too innovative, thus creating diseconomies in the real economy. He admitted, however, that the evidence for...

Simon Johnson posted Tuesday on The Baseline Scenario a loose review of the economic data behind the argument that finance is simply too large. Over the past few weeks this theme has heated up; the Financial Times has columns Wednesday by Willem Buiter and John Plender wrestling...

Wouldn't you have wanted to be at Treasury on Tuesday when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner read the New York Times? There, at the top of the op-ed page, Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., continues to wage war against the Treasury's plan for a super-regulator (that's...

Monday's Wall Street Journal includes the usual start-of-the-week supplement with an unusually provocative headline: The Mistakes We Make -- And Why We Make Them. In fact, the piece, by Meir Statman, a finance professor at Santa Clara University, is another of a seemingly endless number of attempts to apply...

The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel's In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic is just out to the usual accompanying publicity. It's a very pleasant read, written in that WSJ style adapted to books that hit its apotheosis with Barbarians at the Gate and has...

Robert Skidelsky has a column in the Financial Times Thursday arguing that economics has gone off the track with its smothering embrace of mathematics and the presumption that it can predict the future. As always with Skidelsky, the eminent biographer of John Maynard Keynes (one of the great biographies...

Every high school biology student (if they're awake) knows the story of the famous experiment concocted by Columbia's Harold Urey many decades ago. Urey used a set of basic inputs -- heat, electricity, water, some basic elements -- to simulate the creation of the first organic compounds in a flask....

Felix Salmon has replied to my post Monday on the question of financial journalism's responsibility to make complex material accessible to a broad audience. Salmon, as usual, offers a reasoned response, though I think in some cases he's exaggerating what I actually wrote. My earlier post did not...

Last week Felix Salmon at Reuters posted a comment by Choire arguing that Matt Taibbi in his take-down of Goldman, Sachs & Co. (NYSE:GS) "at least is explaining (or trying to explain) complicated financial operations in the real world -- while the finance writers and bloggers are often willfully...

Michael Skapinker has a column in the Financial Times Tuesday discussing an oath, hatched at Harvard Business School, that's been getting publicity of late. The oath, apparently signed by 1,100 business school graduates -- we're counting! -- promises the usual oath shtick: Be good, be true, mentor effectively. Skapinker...

Justin Fox's book, The Myth of the Rational Market has been reviewed widely and received, in the main, good notices. Indeed, it's a pleasant read through some pretty forbidding material, though by necessity there's quite a bit of overlap with the late Peter Bernstein's Against the Gods and...

Nobody just announces anything anymore. Before anyone in Washington can get lunch, it has to be leaked, briefed, previewed in speeches, summarized in op-eds. And so it is with Treasury's much-mooted financial regulatory reform proposals.

After weeks of releasing bits and pieces of the plan -- derivatives, bank regulation, executive...

Isn't Washington wonderful? In the run-up to testimony by Bank of America chief Ken Lewis on the Merrill Lynch & Co. affair, e-mails are suddenly leaking from the Beltway colander, though their ultimate source, strangely enough, is that opaque wonderland, the Federal Reserve.

The New York Times and the...

As the regulatory reform process chugs to life, how should we think about the lobbying process? The Wall Street Journal has a story Thursday reporting that various groups are working to delay or to soften new Financial Accounting Standards Board rules forcing banks to account for off-balance-sheet operations. Wednesday...