Barrett Sheridan

As oil shot up to $150 a barrel last year, venture capitalists (VCs) poured money into clean technologies like NASA-caliber fuel cells, on the belief that their costly, sci-fi-inspired advances would remain competitive even if oil fell to $50 a barrel.

Sinking...Like a Rock: The auto industry's woes continue. Chrysler will likely file for bankruptcy next week. Meanwhile, Ford lost $1.4 billion last quarter, on top of a $14.6 billion loss in 2008, but says it still won't need a government bailout.What's His Motivation?: A Madoff movie is already in the works.

 Because this quarter, in the midst of -- say it with me now -- the worst global recession in 70 years, profit at Amazon.com grew by 24 percent, to $177 million.

You've got to hand it to Jim Owens, the CEO of Caterpillar -- he knows how to craft a provocative sentence. Like this one, for instance: "I'd rather be President Hu than President Obama." That's what he told a gathering of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC today. (Hat tip to Real Time Economics.)The reason he'd prefer a seat of power in Beijing over Washington right now is that the task for China's leaders is to encourage consumer spending, telling their citizens, in effect, to...

Merle Hazard is the self-proclaimed "first and only country singer to write about mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and leveraged buyouts." His latest ditty is "Mark to Market," dedicated to "the courageous men and women of the Financial Accounting Standards Board." Hat tip to our illustrious photo editor Kathy Jones.

Today in encouraging news: Obama has called credit card CEOs to the White House. They'll meet on Thursday and, according to McClatchy, Obama will "stress the need for greater clarity in the way that credit cards are marketed and administered."This of course is a preliminary step in reining in shoddy lending practices, which extended not just to mortgages but credit cards and other consumer loans.

Is financial innovation good for society? In a speech last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a qualified yes. Financial innovation really picked up after 1980, and "I don't think anyone wants to go back to the 1970s," he said.Ryan Avent, the new blogger-in-chief over at Portfolio's Market Movers, thought that statement rather funny:According to Bernanke, no one, "wants to go back to the 1970s," but neither could Bernanke point to a truly helpful piece of financial innovation...

America Is "Fill in the Blank": We've already heard that America is Russia, America is Japan, and America is a developing country. Here's another hat to try on: Krugman says America is Irish. (And it has nothing to do with how much Guinness we drink.) Really?

History repeats itself, but not without a few wrinkles. We make the connections, then we pick them apart.

Go on, have that spicy tuna roll -- do it for the economy.

Me Too!: Citigroup follows in Goldman Sachs's footsteps and says it had its best quarter since 2007. Is it just coincidence that the banks sprung to sudden health as soon as mark-to-market rules were relaxed?

Green Acres: Two-thirds of Japan's full-time farmers are 65 or older, and some are hoping that mounting job losses in the corporate sector result in younger workers going back to the fields.

Floyd Norris blogged the Goldman Sachs conference call this morning. For those that don't know, Goldman is in the news this week for making a reported $1.8 billion profit in the first quarter of 2009.

Many think so. Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson wrote in the Atlantic recently that "from 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits...this decade, it reached 41 percent." He calls it a "quiet coup." Felix Salmon at Reuters complains that "financial services companies are meant to be intermediaries, middlemen.

Scrub Up: The Treasury Department is preparing General Motors for a fast, "surgical," bankruptcy.Earnings Season: Some big names announce earnings this week, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

As the financial crisis evolves, so does the vocabulary being used to describe—or obscure—it. Looking to neuter some of the most loaded terms, policy wonks and businessmen are feeling the urge to rebrand.

It's Friday afternoon and there's little chance you're interested in another probing, insightful blog post, so how about a little satire from McSweeney's instead?

Green Shoots Turn to Weeds: Or at least that's how the Financial Times interprets the minutes from the last Federal Reserve meeting, which were bleaker than expected.

The H-1B visa is one of those policies that everyone loves to hate. It gives skilled immigrants -- scientists, engineers, researchers, etc. -- the right to live and work in the U.S. for six years, so nativists hate it right off the bat.

 Two weeks ago our crack digital team released a package on the history of greed, which included a photographic parade of some of the greediest figures of all time.

This piece in Foreign Policy says yes. Those that agree like to point out that after World War II, Great Britain, glorious empire though it may have been, was extravagantly in debt; the U.S. was a net creditor to the world, and Britain's most important source of financing.

Happy Days Are Here Again?: Obama's still got it: Two-thirds of Americans approve of his job performance, according to a new New York Times poll. And though 70 percent of respondents said they were worried about layoffs affecting their families, the percentage of people who thought the country was on the right track jumped from 15 percent pre-inauguration to 39 percent today.

MainStreet.com (a personal-finance-oriented offshoot of TheStreet.com) just released its Happiness Index, a Prozac-addled tweak on the famous Misery Index.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff has become a bogeyman in economics circles, a piece of misguided, Depression-era legislation that raised tariffs to exorbitant rates and choked the world trade system near to death.

 This is a sentence you don't ever want to read:"The quality of the US census may be undermined because of rising numbers of people living in garages, tents, basements and motels as the financial crisis deepens." That's from the Financial Times, which says that "there is little data on the rise in 'non-traditional' housing, which is something the Census Bureau will generate for the first time as it seeks people out this year." The Bureau will hire 2,000 additional census-takers to deal with...

 G20 Recap: The biggest win was an additional $1.1 trillion in funding for international aid agencies, and Jeffrey Sachs said simply that the results were "deeply heartening." Dani Rodrik called it a "a victory for the Europeans." Felix Salmon at Reuters said the resultant statement was "more substantive and harder-hitting" than most.

Former AIG CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg is clearly still in the first of the Five Stages of Grief. As he told the Wall Street Journal:  "I don't feel any responsibility at all."That's a bold statement for a man who spent 38 years building AIG into an international powerhouse, started the financial-products unit responsible for its implosion and left the firm only in 2005 -- at which point "the unit had already sold about half of the swaps that caused the biggest problems."

I just came across a fantastically interesting paper from Christopher Crowe, an economist at the IMF. (Hat tip to Zubin Jelveh at Economix.) Citing Robert Shiller's work on "irrational exuberance," Crowe sets out to test the hypothesis that "the housing cycle should be more muted in areas with high concentrations of households whose beliefs or 'values' make them less prone to participating in a speculative mania." And who better to test the idea on than evangelical Protestants, whose fervent...

The economy is back on track and economists expect global growth of four percent this year. Happy April Fool's Day!Apocalypse Now: On the eve of the G20 Summit in London, protesters take to the streets. "Four marches, led by representations of horsemen of the apocalypse, converged on the Bank in the Financial Fools' Day protest," reports the Financial Times.

Often when I turn on CNBC or open the Wall Street Journal I'm greeted with a headline or statement about "how the market reacted to" this or that, with the "this or that" often being a speech by Obama, Geithner, et al.