Ebola: The View from 3° 30’ South
I moved to Burundi in February. I work for a small company providing training and micro credit to 30,000 subsistence farmers. Recently, I spoke with several Burundian friends about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. I asked them if they…
The Most Powerful Woman in the World
On February 1st, Janet Louise Yellen, will become the most powerful woman in the world. At the independent Fed, the Chairman must occasionally answer badly informed and sometimes snarky questions from congress but other than a cumbersome impeachment process (see…
Our Debt-Capacity Fishery
Environmental economists have a useful framework to analyze limited but renewable resources. It is called maximum sustainable yield. For a fishery, it measures the number of fish that can be harvested each year without impairing the future viability of the…
What Went Wrong? Expectations Matter
Five years ago we found out who was not too big to fail. Lehman Brothers went down on September 15, 2008, with over $600 billion in assets setting off a remarkable chain of events. A few days later John McCain…
How Risky Is Uncle Sam?
The first time I heard the phrase “country risk” associated with the United States of America I was at an international private equity conference in the fall of 2009. I was shocked that European investors were applying analytical techniques to…