By David Leonhardt. “One book that may deserve more attention than it’s received is “Too Big to Save,” by Robert Pozen, a former vice chairman of Fidelity Investments. I found Chapter 6 — on capital requirements — especially useful. As Mr. Pozen writes, these requirements are ‘the most criticial component of any regulatory system for commercial banks or investment banks.’ “

By Katharine Q. Seelye. What is the Public Option? “Some see it as having the government act as a provider of last resort,” Robert C. Pozen, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, wrote online in Harvard Business, arguing in favor of state-based public options. “Others mean a national one-payer system based on the Medicare model. Still others mean health care cooperatives, though they do not exist in most of the U.S.”

Whatever the public option may actually be, the public itself seems ..read more

Op-ed by Robert C. Pozen. Congress shouldn’t make the best the enemy of the good. If it avoids the tricky question of damages measurement and adopts these five amendments, it would weed out low-quality patent claims, reduce the number of expensive lawsuits and reward our best innovators.

Congress should extend the 1991 bailout law for banks to all financial institutions. In addition, any institution that lacks F.D.I.C. insurance for small depositors should be bailed out only if the Fed determines that its failure would materially jeopardize the entire financial system. In that case, the Fed should be required to evaluate, and document for subsequent review, whether a bailout is truly the least costly way of protecting the financial system. This is the only way to ensure that ..read more

EXECUTIVES of publicly traded companies complain bitterly about American investors’ undue emphasis on short-term results. Yet paradoxically, two-thirds of the companies in the S.&P. 500 project what their next quarter’s earnings per share will be — and then spend huge amounts of time and resources in a dubious effort to meet that projection.

Evidence is mounting that giving what’s called quarterly guidance (for example, “next quarter the company is expected to earn $2.42 to $2.44 per share”) is detrimental to a ..read more