When Andreas and I decided to start this blog project, we had a few rough guidelines on what we wanted to write about. Finance and economics were not high up on that list.

However, I want to write something of a fan letter for Barron’s, the business weekly published by Dow Jones. I’ve always been mildly curious about finance – in fact, the best learning experience I’ve ever had (in any subject) was the MBA economics course I took at the Stern School of Business as part of my NYU MSIS studies with Professor Navin Chopra (maybe not coincidentally, the best teacher I’ve ever had).

However, since then I haven’t followed economics very much, beyond maybe reading Gretchen Morgenson in the Sunday NY Times (she’s great too). So when I found an issue of Barron’s at the gym a few weeks ago, it was only out of boredom between sets that I picked it up and started skimming. I was immediately impressed with the writing: plenty smart, with just a whiff of irreverence, and incredibly readable – without watering things down to the extent the mass-market monthly financial magazines do.

Take this passage from the scathing article on the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac crisis by Jonathan Laing that made the news recently:

“… the fair-value figures reported by the companies may overstate the values of their assets significantly. By some calculations each company is around $50 billion in the hole. But more on that later.”

…now if that isn’t a page turner, what is?

And this:

“Come May, Fannie kept its side of the bargain by raising $7.2 billion in mostly common equity. But Bush officials were shocked when Freddie failed to follow suit on an announced $5.5 billion equity raise.”

These two mis-managed firms have lost about 90% of their value over only the past year, and Mr. Laing clearly believes it’s only a matter of time before the government is forced to either manage their liquidation or nationalization.

As such, it’s a big story – the intersection of capitalism (and risk) vs. socialism (and responsibility) – and Mr. Laing just does an excellent job of telling it.

So check out Barron’s, either on the new stand or (much more economically) by website subscription.