Simon Johnson, scourge of the banking class, does it again with a scalding review of former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s self-serving memoir in The New Republic. Pretty much everybody agrees that Paulson was unprepared for the tsunami that hit Wall Street. Johnson is far less kind, speculating that Paulson seized the opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons. He suggests that the Treasury Secretary abandoned Lehman Brothers (and the bank’s less-than-chummy CEO Richard Fuld) to its creditors in the cause of showing that his friends at the other banks had to be saved – no matter what the cost to taxpayers.
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Hard Ball |
Professor Dieter Helm (Oxford) is a very fine fly fisherman, and an even better economist. If you haven’t done so, take a look at his new book “The Carbon Crunch: How We Are Getting Climate Change Wrong — and How to Fix It” for a bit of unconventional wisdom. He argues that politicians and the general public have not shown any real interest in addressing climate change. Helm argues that places like Europe should focus on setting a price for carbon that would cover consumption (and not just production), and that fracking could be a good “bridge” technology for reducing consumption of coal. The book is readable and insightful for those interested in the inside track on climate policy. 
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