In 2005, when I interviewed Tim Gill, a multimillionaire technology entrepreneur and political activist, he told me that the most efficient use of political dollars was at the local level. Rather than funding national battles, he said, he planned to funnel more of his political dollars to local races and ballot issues. “You have a [...]

Automobile-finance companies pushed hard to get in on the government’s $700 billion financial rescue plan. Now, with the industry’s troubles expected to deepen, they are exploring further moves, including help from the Federal Reserve.
The plan outlined by the U.S. central bank Tuesday to effectively lend to companies to fund day-to-day operations will likely not include [...]

Bernanke

Congress just put a $700 billion hot potato back on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s lap, and without the tool the Fed had sought to make its job easier: the ability to pay interest on bank reserves.
That could leave the Fed with little choice but to eventually lower interest rates again to keep the economy [...]

A roundup of economic news from around the Web.
Economist Debate: The Economist is hosting a debate on how best to re-regulate the system after the credit crisis. The participants are Myron Scholes advocating a light touch, and Joseph Stiglitz arguing for stronger regulation. Scholes writes: There is now a rising chorus among regulators, politicians and [...]

Mayor Mike has soared to the No. 8 spot on the Forbes list of richest Americans.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, right, and artist Olafur Eliasson, tour one of Mr. Eliasson’s waterfall projects, center, at the Brooklyn Bridge in New York.

According to Forbes, Michael Bloomberg had the biggest wealth gain of anyone on the list this year, with [...]

It is not all that long ago that the big credit crunch banks were being lambasted in some quarters for their plans to invest heavily in Chinese banks, and that at least one pundit was predicting “The Coming Collapse of China”. How things change! Now it is the titans of Wall Street and the City [...]

For the past year, I have been predicting (wrongly) that the art market will correct. It defied the financial odds in part because the crisis hadn’t reached the super-rich and because a fresh wave of oligarchs and Middle Eastern sheiks hoisted their bidding paddles to save the day.

Gerhard Richter’s “Claudius” displayed at Christie’s auction house [...]

In a Smart Company article by James Thomson called MP renews calls for investigations into mistreatment of Bakers Delight franchisee, he quotes:
NSW parliamentarian Joanna Gash has renewed calls for the Australian Federal Police to launch an investigation into accusations Bakers Delight and ANZ bank colluded to put a franchisee out of business.
Quoting emails between the [...]

We have been here before with baby milk, pet food and Sudan Red (see more here). Not to mention the execution of the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration. But the current baby milk powder crisis shows that there is still a serious supply chain risk, and that companies need to proactively [...]