Friedman Figuratively Speaking
I love Thomas Friedman. I was first exposed to him when he was the NY Times Jerusalem bureau chief and wrote a terrific book on the Middle East, From Beirut To Jerusalem. Since then, he's become more famous and influential in economic matters through his book, The World is Flat. So I was perplexed and dismayed when I read his editorial in today's NY Times: Start Up The Risk-Takers. In it, he suggests a silly stimulus idea - "Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today... and make them this offer: The US Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way." There are numerous reasons this is a dumb and impractical idea. Friedman threw out another dumb idea a few weeks ago in an editorial titled The Open Door Bailout. In this article he opines: "I would have loved to have seen the stimulus package include a government-funded venture capital bank to help finance all the start-ups that are clearly not starting up today — in the clean-energy space they’re dying like flies — because of a lack of liquidity from traditional lending sources."
