How the Super-Rich Are Surviving the Meltdown | Newsweek Business

THE ECONOMY
Who’s Watching the Money?
Michael Hirsh 11/22/2008 12:00:00 AM
Barack Obama thought he could have a fairly normal transition. Oh, he knew how serious the financial crisis was ("something that we have not seen since the Great Depression," he told "60 Minutes"). But after pledging to tackle the economy "head-on" at a Nov. 7 news conference in Chicago—with 16 of the nation's economic elites standing behind him like the board of America Inc.—Obama apparently felt he'd said enough. There is "only one government and one president at a time," he said, adding that he would apply "deliberate haste" to choosing a Treasury secretary and other cabinet members. Then the president-elect ensconced himself in his transition bunker in Chicago, attending to important matters like discussing the secretary-of-state slot with Hillary Clinton.
Feeding the Fever Line
Daniel Gross 11/21/2008 12:00:00 AM
On Friday afternoon, the markets shot up nearly seven percent on the news that President-elect Obama was poised to name Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve, as the next Treasury Secretary. Why was this leak worth several hundred billion dollars in market capitalization?
FILM
A New Golden Age?
11/12/2008 12:00:00 AM
As more and more economists compare the nation's current financial crisis to the Great Depression of the 1930s, it begs the question — will the movies be as good? That decade was, after all, Hollywood's Golden Age, producing movies that remain some of the greatest ever to emerge from the studio system.
The View From The Empire State Building
10/20/2001 12:00:00 AM
On Sept. 11, from my bedroom window two blocks away, I watched the collapse of New York's tallest buildings, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Now when I go to work, it's at the city's once-again-tallest building, the 102-story Empire State Building.
Jack The Dripper Returns
Peter Plagens
BY THE TIME JACKSON POLLOCK came along, almost all the basic ways of putting paint on a picture had been discovered. The 19th-century impressionists had practically exhausted stippling. Brushy expressionism had been pre-empted by some Germans just before World War I. Kasimir Malerich trotted out a blank-looking, white-on-white canvas in Russia in 1918. The territory of neat, flat colored rectangles was claimed by Mondrian in the 1920s. And since the early '80s, Salvador Dali had enjoyed a virtual lock on smoothly detailed surrealism. Nevertheless, Pollock found an empty slot and set up shop: he dripped--or poured or splattered--his paint. True, a few artists had occasionally produced drip paintings before Pollock did. But Pollock was the first to make dripping his entire, ongoing method. His signature style became instantly recognizable (Life magazine famously asked in 1949, "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?"), and Pollock spent the years 1947 to 1951 devoted to it.
Promises, Promises

MOVIES