After a great deal of soul-searching and quite frankly agony, they concluded they just don’t have critical mass to withstand the enormous pressure and machinery of the U.S. government.
—Tom Lauria, White and Case, on the capitulation of Oppenheimer as an opponent to the US government’s restructuring plan for Chrysler
Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
—Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties
hotels, flights, et al
if socialized medicine is so evil, why didn’t Republicans privatize the V.A. health system when they controlled both the White House and the Congress during 2001-06?
—Uwe Reinhardt in NYT: Economix
Despite these visions, the flashing lasers and latex aliens, “Star Trek” is fundamentally about two men engaged in a continuing conversation about civilizations and their discontents.
—NYT: Manohla Dargis on the new Star Trek movie
The Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP) – where’s the money, Lebowski?
There is a reassurance in clarity.
With the clarity today’s announcement will bring, we hope banks are going to get back to the business of banking
—Tim Geithner
The results of the stress should put to rest the harmful speculation we have seen over the past few months
—Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association
We have to be careful not to over-interpret the results
—Doug Elliott, Brookings, following a report that they would have to raise more than $100b
We were looking into an abyss a couple of months ago. Some of the worst-case scenarios seem to be much less likely now and there’s some more upside risk.
We’re going to get to the point where recovery is just not soaring and they’re going to do the same again. We’re going to have a very slow recovery from here
We definitely seem to be hitting a plateau but that doesn’t mean we’re going to bounce up in the next couple of years. We’ll be in this long period, maybe two years, of vulnerability.
They hope people think the recession won’t be so deep, so the banks’ losses won’t be so bad, so their equity will be worth something
—Kenneth Rogoff in a Bloomberg interview, May 6, 2009
The desire to bring back the boring, small banking industry of the nineteen-fifties is understandable. Unfortunately, the only way to do that would be to bring back the economy of the fifties, too. Banking was boring then because the economy was boring. The financial sector’s most important job is channelling money from investors to businesses that need capital for worthwhile investment. But in the postwar era there wasn’t much need for this. The economy, while remarkably strong, was dominated by huge companies that faced little competition, and could finance investments out of their profits. And entrepreneurship was restrained: there were many fewer start-ups then than in the period after 1980. So the financial sector didn’t have much to do.
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