Will the continuing scandal over LIBOR insure Barack Obama’s re-election in November? It’s a distinct possibility. There is considerable irony in the controversy over the benchmark London Interbank Offered Rate, which cost Barclays Bank a $450 million fine for rigging…
Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick By Paul Dickson (Walker & Co., 418 pages, $29.50) I confess I don’t much like today’s major league baseball—or MLB, as it is branded—for the same reason I can’t understand why any sane person would…
Banker to the World: Leadership Lessons from the Front Lines of Global FinanceBy William R. Rhodes(McGraw-Hill, 252 pages, $25) AS ANY tort lawyer will tell you, society has a habit of demanding an unrestricted supply of baked goods without any…
The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism by Theodore Dalrymple (Encounter Books, 163 pages, $23.95) Among the features we savor most when reading our London cousins, The Spectator, are the acerbic observations of Theodore Dalrymple about his…
Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War By Thomas B. Allen (Harper, 416 pages, $26.99) First of all, let’s get rid of the myth (blamed on John Adams) that during our War of Independence American opinion was…
As the current political brawl appears headed for resolution certainly the most interesting, and possibly most important, political campaign this season has been waged well under the radar of the establishment mass media and has created not a ripple in…
I MISS THE LATE HENRY SIMMONS, the legendary Newsweek reporter who covered the early NASA space flights and the Washington economics beat back in the days when that magazine produced important information and not pop-twitter. Henry kept the betting book…
In the Name of Justice: Leading Experts Reexamine the Classic Article “The Aims of the Criminal Law” Edited by Timothy Lynch (Cato Institute, 251 pages, $19.95) At the start of the one unsatisfactory year I labored at Duke Law School…
It is commonplace today to believe we should refer to the benign innovations of John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression in order to understand what is driving President Obama’s team of economic strategists. But a look back to that…