Blogonomics: The Econobloggers Panel
Can be found here. If you’re having trouble with the sound, it kicks in properly around the 8 minute mark. And yes, Yves Smith really is a woman.
View ArticleApple Datapoint of the Day
This is entirely anecdotal, but there’s no doubt what the single most popular laptop is at the Milken Global Conference: the MacBook Air. The conference skews decidedly Republican, with a lot of very...
View ArticlePolitical Hacks: The Backlash
Macroeconomic discussions at the Milken Conference tend to feature a great deal of party-political Republican talking points. The lunch panel on Monday was moderated by Steve Forbes, the breakfast...
View ArticleThe State of Private Equity
Apollo’s Leon Black (#6 on the latest private equity league table) kicked off an interesting discussion on the private equity panel this morning, when he said that the backlog of leveraged loans held...
View ArticleThe Unintended Consequences of Water Pricing
I didn’t manage to catch all that much of the water panel, but I was struck by Israel’s Booky Oren, who said that 38 of the US states are coping with drought, but that if US agriculture used 50% reused...
View ArticleThe State of the Music Industry
The music panel featured Andy Lack, the chairman of Sony BMG, who somehow contrived to be reasonably upbeat about the recorded-music industry. It was his misfortune to be sat next to Quincy Jones, who...
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The State of Catastrophe Bonds
The panel on catastrophe bonds coincided with the release of a Milken Institute report on the topic. Catastrophe bonds make a huge amount of sense, in theory. The cost of Hurricane Katrina was over $65...
View ArticleWhat the Internet Doesn’t Transform
The PR panel in some ways encapsulated the weird nexus between corporate America and internet-era technology which has characterized a large part of the Milken Conference. Monday it was newspapers,...
View ArticleQuote of the Day: Frictionlessness
Eric Feng of Hulu, on the digital innovation panel: Media is an impulse business. It’s foolish to expect that the user is going to climb mountains and cross hurdles to get to that content. This is very...
View ArticleWhy Some Countries Find it So Hard to Get Rich
Nobel laureates are always a big draw at the Milken Conference, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that the room was full when Michael Spence moderated a panel on the relationship between growth and...
View ArticleThe Problems of Congestion Pricing in LA
Tim Rutten objects to congestion pricing on LA freeways, and I, like Mark Thoma, am sympathetic. Since I was such a strong advocate of congestion pricing in New York City, however, it’s worth teasing...
View ArticleThe State of Credit
The Milken Global Conference kicked off this morning with a panel moderated by Mike Milken on the only possible subject: credit. It was a high-level panel, with some high-level discourse: one of the...
View ArticleCities: The Least Bad Part of US Real Estate
As a general rule, if you get the opportunity to hear Sam Zell speak, you should take it. He was on the real estate panel today, and he didn’t disappoint. The moderator was Lew Feldman, a real-estate...
View ArticleHow Important is it to Jail Insider Traders?
An interesting discussion about regulators with teeth cropped up during John Gapper’s panel on financial centers. Gapper noted that the SEC was much better at jailing white-collar criminals than any of...
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