Best Business Commentary

The squandering of a winning season

Citigroup and the New York Mets both had it sewed up, says David Weidner in MarketWatch. But just as the “star-studded, big-payroll Mets” blew their seven-game lead, Citigroup—“the world's biggest, most-diversified, and once the most profitable financial services company”—is writing down $5.9 billion and seeing profits drop by 60 percent. The link between the two teams goes beyond Citigroup’s record $20 million-a-year naming-rights deal for the Mets’ nascent Citi Field. Both were done in by bad calls from managers. And regardless of whose head rolls, “Citigroup and the Mets will look much different come the start of spring.”

Fighting global warming, embracing markets

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We can “use free-market solutions to attack global warming without imposing an undue burden on the world economy,” says Jeremy Siegel in Kiplinger.com. Using “today’s technologies,” California has implemented effective “energy-efficiency improvements,” and “no one I know would call the state impoverished” because of them. We have to raise the cost of carbon emissions, and the European Union’s market-based “‘cap and trade’ system” is the most promising. A market price for carbon emissions would give both “consumers and producers clear signals about how to conserve.”