Above the Crowd

It is reassuring to see the press take a more modulated view of the swine-flu risks, especially as it becomes clear that both deaths and incidents have been overstated in the past week.  Our “instant on” media has an insatiable appetite for the scintillating story.  These days, you can actually sense the disappointment in the news anchor when a category four hurricane is downgraded to a category three.   Some people rationalize that this hysteria serves a noble purpose, in that it prepares us for the worse.  This, however, ignores the fact that there are tremendous real economic costs to overreaction, and that sometimes overreaction has far reaching negative impacts which can be many times greater than […]

While I attempted to bury this issue last week , this Sunday, Thomas Friedman again used his pulpit in the New York Times Opinion section to beg for a VC Bailout.  Last week he merely suggested that the government invest along side venture firms.  This week, he went even further astray and suggested that the government “Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners — university endowments and pension funds — are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way.”  As a practicing venture […]

[Note: Update to this post, posted 2/22/09] A few weeks back, a friend mentioned an idea he had heard suggesting that the government consider entering the VC (venture capital) business as part of the overall stimulus plan.  Specifically, the argument was made for the government to provide excess venture capital funding to the green sector.  At first, I assumed this was just one individual’s idea, but the noise level has risen to the point where it is reasonable to assume there is a group pushing or lobbying for this outcome.  Last week, Thomas Friedman jumped on the bandwagon in a New York Times article titled Open Door Bailout .  Friedman […]