There are, as usual, no big surprises in my bracket (which you can view at the Sporting Scene blog), since I’ve picked three No. 1 seeds to make the Final Four. (I do have West Virginia going to the finals, but given the way the Mountaineers have been playing, and given Kentucky’s yo ... Read more

Felix Salmon has been doing a bang-up job in recent days of debunking the misinformed attacks on the relationship between credit default swaps and Greek interest rates. So it’s dismaying that on the subject of “too big to fail” banks, he’s engaging in precisely the kind o ... Read more

I wouldn’t call today’s health-care summit a waste of time, as some have. But I think it’s safe to say that, in practical terms, it won’t end up accomplishing much. That’s not the result of any flaw in the way the summit was run—while there was more speechifyi ... Read more

Stylistically, I thought Obama struck the right note last night. He seemed confident and relaxed, and I thought the moments when he stepped out of the role of speechmaker and spoke in a more conversational tone were especially effective. And those quick humorous asides—like the line about it ... Read more

Just a few quick thoughts on the iPad announcement: Steve Jobs’s assertion that there was no reason to build a new product unless it performed better than what’s already out there sounds obvious, but in fact it’s not the way many businesses think about making products. Product ... Read more

In the past few weeks, and especially now, after Scott Brown’s election, everyone has been full of advice for Barack Obama, counseling him on how he can do a better job of seizing back the political reins. Much of this advice, I think, is off the mark simply because it ascribes views to Amer ... Read more

Scott Brown’s surprise victory in yesterday’s Massachusetts senatorial election is being seen in many quarters as evidence that Democrats reached too far on health-care reform. Setting aside the fact that some of the opponents of the health-care bills Congress just passed oppose them b ... Read more

Reading the movements of individual stocks as if they told you exactly what investors were thinking is, generally speaking, a mug’s game. Nonetheless, it seems unlikely that insurance stocks have risen sharply, far more sharply than the overall market, on a day when the Massachusetts special ... Read more

I’ve been making the argument that while moral hazard, in the wake of the financial crisis, is now a serious problem (because of the implicit guarantee that big banks will not be allowed to fail), it did not play a key role in shaping the policies and decisions that led to the crisis. For ... Read more

City File has a wonderful photo collage made up of different shots of the bankers at yesterday’s FCIC hearing, each one labeled with a different mood. The best is right in the middle: John Mack of Morgan Stanley gazing up, with the tag “Dreamfulness.” I’m not sure that ... Read more