Anyone who read Frank Partnoy’s book F.I.A.S.C.O will immediately appreciate the context of this story: The NYT reported today how Wall St. banks Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan assisted the Greek government in hiding hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, while collecting over $300 million in fees for themselves. According to the Times:
Wall Street [...]

There was a lot of discussion yesterday about the court battle over government access to geolocation data for cell phones. This conjures up all the jokes about how it’s easier to find cows in Canada than to find illegal aliens in the US. The irony is that in the US, people pay for—and pay taxes [...]

Politico reported last week that 49 congressional web sites were hacked, which only became apparent just after the State of the Union Address last week. Web sites displayed simple hacker-speak web pages and many of the sites were completely unavailable for hours.
This should be great fodder for the Black Hat folks meeting in DC (actually [...]

Paul Krugman posted an interesting piece in the NYT today, in which he ruminated on the testimony offered before congress by some of the leading banking executives, and concluded the following:
Do the bankers really not understand what happened, or are they just talking their self-interest? No matter. As I said, the important thing looking forward [...]

This week, I started a new job as Sr. Manager at Accenture. I’ll be working in Accenture’s Security Consulting Practice, focusing on Identity and Access Management. So my new role is basically a continuation of my career for the last dozen years, but at Accenture it’s also an opportunity to get involved in some of [...]

The NYT ran an article today discussing how humans may be wired for trust. In a recent study of small children, scientists discovered that traditional views of human nature as hopelessly egocentric and fiercely competitive don’t portray the full picture. From the article:
“We’re preprogrammed to reach out,” Dr. de Waal writes. “Empathy is an automated [...]

In continuation of Elinor Ostrom week on this blog, I thought it appropriate to point everyone to one of her recent collaborations, “Rules, Games, and Common Pool Resources,” a preview of which is freely available on Google books.
In my view, professional security certification programs like CISSP should include this material in their curriculum. The Internet [...]

Elinor Ostrom is the first woman in history to win the Nobel Prize for economics. In my opinion, this is the news of the year. Ostrom’s work strikes at the heart of the human condition, and her conclusions challenge the way we think about governance, trust, and financial systems. She’s also a gifted writer.
The NYT [...]

The New York Times recently ran a piece called “How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?” The article is a brisk stroll through the intellectual heritage of economic theory in an effort to point out its developmental flaws. Here’s a snippet from the Times article that I think sums it up pretty well:
Yet [most economists] [...]

Joseph Stiglitz recently published an article in Vanity Fair that discusses many of the themes of this blog (for example, see: Let’s Not Confuse Free Markets With Freedom, America on the Couch, and 2008: The Year the Free Market Died.) A Nobel-laureate economist, Stiglitz provides historical context in making his case that free-market capitalism isn’t [...]