Free Republic

Long before the rest of us were talking about blue and red America, Tom Wolfe not only recognized the cultural divide; he bridged it. When he began his career in the 1960s, the liberal establishment was more dominant and even smugger than it is today. There were no pesky voices on cable television or the web to challenge the Eastern elites’ hold on the national media. Then along came Wolfe, a lone voice celebrating the hinterland’s culture, mercilessly skewering the pretensions and dogmas of New York’s intelligentsia—and somehow triumphing. How did he get away with it? The most entertaining analysis...

Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation. Now I was listening. I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence –...

Crony Bidding And Gross Incompetence Reign.. At a time when Coloradans are desperately pleading for improved and new roadways the agency in charge of the same, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), is mired in the greatest crisis of its long-storied existence . ... In December 2018, Governor Jared Polis appointed 35-year-old Shoshana Lew as his new Executive Director, a history major .. She replaced Governor Hickenlooper's appointment of 56-year-old Michael Lewis, an engineer with extensive public construction management experience. ... Lew's primary qualification .. was her close relationship to Michelle Obama who called the newly elected governor for a...

Is former President Barack Obama about to unleash one long subtweet against his successor in the form of a Netflix show? Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama have acquired the rights to adapt Michael Lewis' book The Fifth Risk as part of their overall deal with Netflix, Deadline reported Wednesday. Lewis' book describes the disorder within the Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, and Department of Commerce that took place during the transition between the Obama administration to the Trump administration.

Everyone's talking about Michael Lewis' latest book Flash Boys and HFT (high-frequency trading) and whether the markets are rigged. What they're not talking about is how the markets have been set up for institutionalized rigging. I'm not kidding. The markets are rigged. You're going to have to get over it and deal with it. The rigging is in the system and that's just the way it is... As to HFT, I'll get to that... But you can't pass judgment on HFT until you understand how cascading technology and unintended consequences landed us in the deep end of the dark pool...

CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE READ. This article was published in 1989. A prescient article by Michael Lewis in 1989 looked at the systemic risk of a Japanese earthquake. TO SUMMARIZE: An earthquake destroys the Tokyo Stock Exchange and all financial records. Shares of Western insurance companies lead a global selloff. Japan liquidates overseas holdings. This causes the U.S. bond to collapse. Recession ensues. Lewis observes that a huge earthquake devastates Tokyo roughly every 70 years or so For the past 400 years. 1923, 1853, 1782, 1703 and 1633.

Michael Lewis recently offered another interesting explanation for a statement made a few months ago, "Goldman Sachs is doomed." The reason the company is doomed is their status as a public corporation, he told Vanity Fair, because it allows them to justify barely legal activity that stops at nothing to profit. A few months ago, the author said Goldman Sachs was doomed because it would never recover from its PR disaster-causing SEC case. Its customers would never be able to trust them if they had a problem with honesty. No customers, no business, went his argument. Now Lewis has changed...

Michael Lewis, the brilliant author of "Liar's Poker" and "Moneyball" pens a lengthy story for Portfolio where he looks at: [T]he willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the...

A Wall Street Trader Draws Some Subprime Lessons: Michael Lewis Bloomberg can not be posted here. Full commentary here

The new Seven Wonders of the World, which were announced last week with great fanfare in Lisbon, are a droll affair. Two are from pre-Columbian America (the citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru and the temples of Chichén Itzá, Mexico), two from Asia (the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China), and one from the Middle East (the rock tombs of Petra, Jordan). The modern world comes up rather short (the mountaintop statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro), as does European civilization in general (represented only by the Coliseum in Rome). Is this list something to...

There are only seven or maybe eight themes for fiction, so I've been told. All the stories you've ever read or heard are merely variations of them. Dubious, but what the hell. Who can resist the theme of the reprobate redeemed by love? Is there anything more satisfying than seeing the haughty hoist--blown up--defeated by hubris? Me, I'm fond of a subset of virtue triumphant, goodness rewarded, namely, the defeat of ignorance by intelligence. I recently discovered a fine instance of that theme, and, marvelous to say, it's nonfiction, a true tale. It's the book, Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and...