Technology & Innovation — March 31, 2010

Wall Street as The Great Gatsby?

Simon Johnson, MIT professor, former Chief Economist at the IMF and co-founder of BaselineScenario.com, stopped by today to talk about the financial crisis and why we desperately need to get rid of “too big to fail” banks. At the beginning of his new book, “13 Bankers,” which came out yesterday, he used an intriguing quote to describe the culture of Wall Street. You might remember it from “The Great Gatsby.” “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Stay tuned for Johnson’s interview, which will launch in the next couple of weeks!

a computer generated image of a human brain.

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Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

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More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

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a group of five matches on a pink background.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

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