Lengthy and very positive profile of Uniqlo in New York Magazine.
Uniqlones: Seemingly out of nowhere, their cheap, skinny rainbow-colored basics became a kind of New York uniform. Just how did the Japanese discount brand become the hottest retailer in the city?
Obviously Uniqlo needs to expand on the coasts (Yanai tells the reporter, SF, LA, and the announced additional store in NYC) but it's still unclear to me how the brand would do in American cities beyond, say, the top 10.
If you're like me and was riveted by the excerpt of Michael Lewis' new book in Vanity Fair, and missed Michael Lewis on 60 Minutes, be sure to catch it all online. There's a bunch of web-only pieces with Lewis and Michael Burry as well. It's amazing to think that some investors in Burry's funds who were so angry at the large bet that Burry made (and won) that they pulled all their funds out as soon as they were able to.
Inside The Collapse, Part 1
Watch CBS News Videos Online
Inside The Collapse, Part 2
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Extra: The $8.4 Billion Bet
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Extra: Wall Street Misfit
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Extra: Is Wall Street Overpaid?
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Extra: Bailout Blues
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I was uneasy after reading Lisa Katayama's piece on otaku culture in the NY Times Magazine last weekend. I tried to put my thoughts into a blog post but nothing coalesced.
Adamu at Mutant Frog Travelogue has a rebuttal and questions some of Katayama's fact-checking in what I think is a great blog post that encapsulates a lot of my thoughts on this topic. If you read that 'Love in 2D' article, please take the time to read Adamu's rebuttal:
Nemutan's revenge - some fact-checking and reaction to the NYT story on anime fetishists
The fashion designer, Issey Miyake, who is a good friend of my family, has an anti-nuclear weapons op-ed in the New York Times.
If Mr. Obama could walk across the Peace Bridge in Hiroshima — whose balustrades were designed by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as a reminder both of his ties to East and West and of what humans do to one another out of hatred — it would be both a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat. Every step taken is another step closer to world peace.
For those of you who were frustrated by the fact that Rolling Stone's website does not have the full text of the recent Matt Taibbi missive on Goldman Sachs, the text of that article has been scanned and OCRed and posted to Somethingawful. I highly recommend reading it.
Someone has to do a wiki or page that lists all the ex-Goldman Sachs executives who are running either key American businesses (like Liddy at AIG) or key US government positions (too many to list.) Clearly Goldman Sachs is too influential and has influence that it should not have with the US government. If there's a company that is worth investigating for being either too big to fail or controlling the markets, it is clearly Goldman Sachs.
My father's good friend, Yamada Hisashi sensei of the Urasenke Chanoyu Center of New York City has passed.
The NY Times did a nice profile of Hisashi-san in 2008.
"There is no politics," Mr. Yamada said. "No talk about who will be president in America or prime minister in Japan."While a tea ceremony might seem out of step with the pace of modern life, the Urasenke school has a waiting list for students.
"Once you begin the study of tea, it becomes a lifetime thing," he said. As for those who think they are too busy to make time for tea, "You discover that you are not as busy as you think you are."
Josh Marshall from TalkingPointsMemo:
TPM Reader JC sent me to this interview with Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb on CNBC. Here's what JC wrote:He hits it spot on. These two guys are talking about a deep structural crisis in the world economy. And these CNBC yahoos can't stop asking for stock tips. Really surreal.In this clip, Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb are still being treated as a circus sideshow by CNBC... They're predicting the end of finance, and offering the only clear path out of this mess that I've seen offered (with the knowledge to back it up), and CNBC keeps asking them for stock tips. It's ludicrous. Wall Street media -- CNBC at least -- doesn't realize how bad this is yet. They're stuck in a bubble where they think everything will go back to normal in a few months....
I'm watching it again now. This is a seminal piece of video. You have to see it. I'm not sure I've seen anything that captures -- albeit unintentionally -- the vast disconnect over what is happening today in the US economy.
Barry Ritholtz has a (3 part) 25-minute documentary by the Wall Street Journal that's worth watching. Note that it is all Wall Street Journal reporters who are interviewed, but it's still worth a viewing.
As a New Yorker, born and raised, my one hope in this recession is that New York City becomes a more heterogeneous city. Wall Street's influence on New York City was too large since the 1990s and into the 2000s. I love New York City but it is not a city I wish to live in at the moment. If New York City can emerge from the recession as a more honest city, a better place for more people to live, not just rich people, I'd like to live there again one day.
While I hope that the global financial system's almost-total-collapse in October has taught us lessons, I think human nature is such that we will make similar mistakes in the future once this time period is in our hazy memory. I had no idea that 'Liar's Poker' was 20 years old.
I thought I was writing a period piece [Michael Lewis' "Liar's Poker"] about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”The End of Wall Street's Boom
As do I.
The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.
As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.
