A month's worth of David Warsh [ Click here to search the Globe Archives for more ]

Finneran's folly
(12/4/2001)
Some 20 years ago, Tom Finneran skied down Mount Attitash - stark naked but for his boots. He was a college student at Northeastern University at the time. He'd been sharing a house with friends. It was spring. There was plenty of beer. They decided to race.

Stimulus, needed or not
(11/27/2001)
A friend of mine was once heard to murmur as he walked away from the cashier's window while opening his paycheck, ''Wow, it really does make a difference when they stop taking Social Security out of your pay.'' It would have been unremarkable - many people enjoyed a few weeks' holiday from the tax at the end of the year in those days, when the Social Security tax topped out at $50,000 or so - except that my friend made his observation in late May, having already reached the threshold.

Short circuit
(11/25/2001)
Jeff Skilling assumed the top job at Houston's Enron Corp. last February in spectacular fashion. The Harvard Business School-trained options trader had learned about risk the hard way, first as a liability manager for First City National Bank of Houston (which nearly went broke in the real estate crash of 1975), then as a McKinsey & Co. consultant to Enron during the 1980s when the former natural gas pipeline operator turned itself into the nation's foremost energy merchant. He joined the company in 1990.

Pound foolish
(11/20/2001)
Marshall Carter, the Vietnam war hero who retired recently after nine years as CEO of State Street Bank, and Sheila Widnall, a professor of aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who served for several years as secretary of the Air Force, were the headliners among the six-member commission appointed last month by Acting Governor Jane Swift to study the situation at the Massachusetts Port Authority, the troubled semi-independent public agency that runs Logan Airport.

Untangling the skeins
(11/13/2001)
Some of the emotional slam of yesterday's crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in New York derived from the fact that a plane again tumbled out of a clear blue sky. Billowing black smoke once again seemed to underscore the threat that terrorism poses to our sense of security as well as to the economic outlook. Was it a terrorist act or a tragic accident? Our concerns now depend critically on an understanding of the extent of the external threat.

Arthritic Japan
(11/11/2001)
As global recession has become a certainty, it is fashionable to compare the United States to Japan. After 40 years of robust growth, Japan has hardly grown at all during the last decade - an average of barely 1 percent since 1992. Many people are calling that a depression. Could it happen here?

Fighting back
(11/6/2001)
So the Microsoft monopoly case is over. For now. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the colorful Reagan-

Privatization put on trial
(11/4/2001)
R ival measures to federalize airport security have turned into the first clear test of political wills on the home front in America's new Cold War.