Economics Roundtable

FT Alphaville is hiring, and I took the opportunity to ask its fearless leader, Paul Murphy, a few questions about the FT's flagship blog operation and the way that bloggers are treated at the pink 'un. Here are his answers:

How big is the Alphaville team?
Currently ...

Ben Stein admits this week to having a "febrile brain". Does that mean he has meningitis? I'm not sure that would necessarily explain much, but maybe it helps us a little way along the road to understanding why the NYT continues to publish his silly conspiracy theories - perhaps ...

John Hechinger reports that lawmakers in Massachussetts are considering a 2.5% tax on the portion of college endowments that exceed $1 billion. Such a tax would raise $1.4 billion a year, with 60% of it coming from Harvard.

Greg Mankiw grumbles that Harvard could or should simply move ...

A quick plug for Specator Business, a brand-new magazine that's just launched in the UK. Its blog, Trading Floor, features the very smart Tim Worstall, and the magazine proper is full of smart columns from the like of my old student newspaper colleague Fraser Nelson. Oh, and ...

Bloomberg has a big article up on the slightly sleazy world of inter-dealer brokers. It's a world I know a little about, since I used to have an inter-dealer broker as my roommate.

This chap was eminently qualified for the job: he had the gift of the gab, he ...

Vikram Pandit, Citigroup’s Chess Master: Has shunted Alberto Verme all the way off to Dubai.

Repo home tours: Should you jump in?

Auto Erotic: Dan Neil on the Bugatti Veyron.

Jerry Abejo has revisited the idea of blog aquisitions, and doesn't really seem to get it. He's not only way off the mark factually (Gawker Media gets over 200 million pageviews a month, not 30 million), but he also seems to give far too much weight to ...

The meme of the day, as admirably summed up by Paul Murphy, is the question of why exactly insider trading is illegal, and whether it should be. I seem to recall a trenchant column by Holman Jenkins in the WSJ around the time of the Martha Stewart case arguing ...

Apparently Citigroup is considering selling off as much as $400 billion in "non-core assets", including its retail banking operations in Germany.

Is Citibank Germany really non-core? It would seem so. I bank with Citi in the US, and on Wednesday I used my ATM card to withdraw some euros ...

Warner Brothers is closing down its two art-house production companies, Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures, with the loss of about 70 jobs. The idea, according to Warner's Alan Horn, is that "between both New Line and main Warner's, we had the pieces in place to release any movie we ...