Brigitte Nguyen CMC '03 Makes Me Hungry

I salute Brigitte Nguyen CMC '03 on getting her own show on Food Network, "From the Kitchens Of..."


I just wish I hadn't come upon it before I saw the South Park episode on food porn. (Not what you think it is, not that I know what you think. God man, get your mind out of the gutter!)

Anyways, CMC's PR arm (no, not Michael Wilner CMC '11) has a good interview with Brigitte over at the school's website where she talked about the embattled food trucks, which she nonetheless likes.

I think the current food truck revolution is absolutely genius and I only wish it would catch on in Lexington! I've always loved the street food scene in other countries and this is the next best thing! Food trucks are an affordable way to eat food that is incredibly fresh, innovative, and just downright delicious. For food truck owners, it can really be all about the food without all the hurdles of managing a full service restaurant. And the best part is that you can change locations whenever you want!

 The knowledge of the local is part of what helped her win the National Council Cooking Contest's $50,000 cash prize in May 2009.  You can watch her talk about that process below:

Andrew Ross Sorkin on Henry Kravis CMC '67

Henry R. Kravis: entrepreneur?

When Andrew Ross Sorkin came to the Athenaeum he criticized the firm of  Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts as a "casino" that was cashing on the end of Glass-Steagall Act. There was a pregnant moment there because not many people knew what to make of the remarks.

Henry R. Kravis CMC '67 doesn't run a casino. He's the very sort of entrepreneur that our policies ought to encourage. But don't take my words for it. Take Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser's word for it.

From an excellent essay on entrepreneurship in New York City on City Journal:  

... in the 1960s, at least three distinct trends—the rise of mathematical finance, the democratization and globalization of investment, and the breakdown of old social barriers—made finance in New York considerably more entrepreneurial. A more sophisticated approach to risk and return began with academics in the 1940s and eventually arrived on Wall Street in the form of tools that could price new assets, like options, and assess whether older investments were priced appropriately. This more sophisticated approach to risk and return enabled the young Michael Milken to argue that junk bonds looked cheap, relative to their historical risk. His breakthrough made it easier for other financial entrepreneurs, like Henry Kravis, to finance acquisitions. It may seem, after the recent crash, that the quantitative approach to finance was a mistake; but the mistake was not using the tools but overusing them and putting far too much faith in them.

Kravis also benefited from ever-more-connected capital markets, which let him access capital from far-flung investors, like pension funds in Oregon. Other entrepreneurs, like Charles Merrill, worked to increase the number of people who invested in Wall Street. The number of Americans who owned securities rose from 12.5 million in 1960 to 32 million in 1972.

We would argue that these effects increased human wealth?

Thoughts on Andrew Ross Sorkin's Talk at the Athenaeum

I took pretty detailed notes for Andrew Ross Sorkin's talk at the Athenaeum.

I must say I was disappointed. It's not because I disagree with him philosophically -- I disagree with a lot of Ath speakers for all kinds of reasons -- but because his contentions seemed so ill-supported.

Allow me to illustrate with a few examples.

1. He started his talk with a discussion about how bad things would have gotten had we not passed TARP and the stimulus. Much of this was doom and gloom and seeing as he went through the trouble of chronicling it, I'll take his facts as given (though I have no reason to, might as well.) One of the points he made was that unemployment could have approached 24 percent once Lehman Brothers collapsed and other companies teetered on bankruptcy. Maybe so, but he bases this prediction on a model by the New York Federal Reserve, which, in my view, has egg on its face for failing to predict the first crisis. Why would we trust a model from them about the future when they couldn't forecast the present?

Let's assume, though, that that's true. We have no idea how long 24 percent unemployment would have lasted. I would submit to you that it would not have lasted nearly as long as the nearly three years of historic unemployment we have had. Would you rather have one year of 24% unemployment or five years of 10%?

Oh, and let's not forget that some "models" from the government -- and most of the principals in Sorkin's book, Too Big To Fail, are from the government or the corporatist business culture -- were totally wrong about the impetus to pass the stimulus in the first place.Sorry, but I don't trust anybody until I can verify it for myself.

2. If a lot of what went on was so "grey" and all of the characters were so complicated, as Sorkin suggests, why did he keep saying "in a perfect world,... I would favor this policy..." Okay, but how relevant is that? We don't create policies for perfect beings. Imperfect beings make policy. Why waste your time designing the ideal? 


And if you are going to think about the ideal, why are you so convinced that your ideas are the ideal? 


Why would small banks be better? (Professor Charles Calomiris in the pages of The Wall Street Journal says that bigger banks would be better, suggesting a kind of natural monopoly.)

Why do we need a Consumer Protection Bureau? The Consumer Protection Bureau has effectively banned pay day loans. Pay day loans are a source of credit for poor people (or people with bad credit). Won't that lead to less credit and won't that be a credit crunch? And don't you not want a credit crunch because that'll lead to less firm formation?

Why was letting Lehman Brothers go a bad thing? Or, by extension: How can you support entrepreneurial creativity when you would have stopped creative destruction from occurring? If "innovation is the only way out," could it be that Lehman Brothers needed to fail for something else to innovate out of its embers?

Why do we need a new Glass-Steagall Act when nowhere else in the world has a Glass-Steagall Act that reportedly separates "casino" and "banking"? Might it be that we are an aberration? Couldn't something else be to blame?


In times of uncertainty, don't give advice because it will be bad. For instance, Sorkin was dismissive of that "buy gold" attitude, but of the people I know who invest seriously, only one has doubled his money in the past year -- and he did it by investing in gold (and silver.)

I asked Sorkin about where he thought the next bubble was -- I suggested higher education based upon my reading of Peter Thiel's comments. He ignored the question and said something about health care and how we need to bend the cost curve. From where I'm looking, this was rather revealing.

The four major bubbles of my lifetime have been the following: tech bubble, housing bubble, higher education bubble, health care bubble. How do I know these were bubbles? Because the assets were often priced much, much than the rate of inflation.

Only one of those -- the tech bubble -- had minimal government intrusion. The bubble burst -- and we got Web 2.0. When those other bubbles burst , what did we get?

Misery.