Best columns: Business

Those spoiled brats of Wall Street

Daniel Gross

Slate.com

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What a bunch of babies, said Daniel Gross in Slate.com. I refer, of course, to the supposed leaders of finance and commerce who populate Wall Street. Lately, traders and other Wall Street types have been “staging public tantrums, screaming and yelling and writhing on the floor until they get what they want.” The outbursts started last summer, when the subprime mortgage mess burst into the open. Since then, the financial elites have been demanding interest-rate cuts and federal relief to rescue them from their disastrous investment decisions. “In response, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has done what any exhausted parent does when a child screams for three hours straight: He gave in,” sharply cutting interest rates twice in two weeks. But as any parent could have told Bernanke, giving in just invites another tantrum. Within hours of Bernanke’s last cut, Wall Street was demanding still lower rates. Why not, given Bernanke’s track record of rushing in with cheap money? It would be better for everyone if Bernanke asked traders to “engage in some introspection—to evaluate what they did wrong and how they could avoid screwing up in the future.” In other words, to behave like grown-ups.

Pomegranates: The truth behind the craze

Anne Kadet

SmartMoney

Suddenly, the pomegranate is everywhere, said Anne Kadet in SmartMoney. “One day it’s featured on Oprah, the next it’s hitting Oscar parties as a cocktail ingredient and making a cameo appearance on Desperate Housewives.” The fruit’s overnight success is no accident. Beverly Hills billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who own the nation’s largest pomegranate farm, have figured out how to promote pomegranate juice as health in a bottle. But their promotion is taking a troubling form. In addition to mounting an expensive marketing campaign, the Resnicks have spent $20 million to fund “50 studies exploring the impact of pomegranate juice on everything from HIV to dental plaque.” How many such industry-funded studies ever report negative findings? None, according to one recent survey. That’s not to say that scientists are “cooking the data,” but “they certainly have every incentive to design a study that pleases their patrons.” If you enjoy pomegranates, by all means, dig in. But remember, for $20 million, you could probably prove that just about any fruit produces “unique and miraculous-sounding benefits.”