Recent Blog Posts
-
The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
Apr 27 20099:04am EDT -
Sinking Animal Spirits
Apr 27 20098:04am EDT -
Counter-cyclical Urban Policy
Apr 26 200910:04am EDT -
Be Your Own Counterfeiter
Apr 26 20099:04am EDT -
Being Tim Geithner
Apr 25 200912:04pm EDT -
Notes From a Press Conference Naif
Apr 25 20099:04am EDT -
What Good is the News?
Apr 25 20098:04am EDT -
Stressful Enough
Apr 24 20092:04pm EDT -
Not Regretting the Pound
Apr 24 20091:04pm EDT -
Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
Apr 24 20099:04am EDT -
Non-Economic Questions of the Day
Apr 24 20099:04am EDT -
The Stress Test Blind Alley
Apr 24 20098:04am EDT -
Happy Hour
Apr 23 20099:04pm EDT -
Recovery Without Rebalancing
Apr 23 20096:04pm EDT -
The Shape of Your Recession
Apr 23 20095:04pm EDT
Links
- Felix Salmon
- DealBreaker
- Ryan Avent: The Bellows
- The Epicurean Dealmaker
- Chris Anderson
- Ultimi Barbarorum
- MarketBeat
- Michelle Leder
- John Quiggin
- The Panelist
- Andrew Leonard
- Streetsblog
- Brad Setser
- Michael Mandel
- Financial Crookery
- Kash Mansori
- Dean Baker
- Calculated Risk
- Free Exchange
- Curbed
- Lance Knobel
- Econospeak
- Carbon Tax Center
- Overcoming Bias
- Mark Thoma
- Naked Capitalism
- Alphaville
- Barry Ritholtz
- Alexander Campbell
- The Bayesian Heresy
- Brad DeLong
- DealBook
- Greg Mankiw
- Deal Journal
- FP Passport
- Carl Bialik
- Marginal Revolution
- A Fistful of Euros
- Dan Gross
Sharing a Cab with an Ayatollah
My Only In Davos moment this morning: sharing a cab from the train station to the conference center with an honest-to-goodness ayatollah, Mahdi Hadavi. He was a panelist at a session I attended yesterday, on faith and modernization, moderated by Tony Blair - that was the panel where I was so impressed by Rick Warren. Given the state of Davos traffic, we had enough time for an interesting conversation, about Tony Blair and Barack Obama.
Hadavi said on the panel that he was impressed by Blair's moderation now - but that he was very unimpressed at the way in which moderates like Blair seem to transmogrify into extremists when they come into power. He said that all of the presidential candidates in the US were essentially the same, as far as he was concerned: committed to entrenching America's status as the sole global superpower. Obama, he said, was just as committed to that end as the rest of the candidates, while he ought to be more focused on domestic issues within the US.
That's one of the good things about Davos: it makes it impossible to think of anybody else as "other" when you chat away with them and realise their views would really not be out of place at a Brooklyn dinner party.
