Felix Salmon

Early life

Salmon's ancestors include Jews who bore the surname Solomon before it was anglicized as Salmon. Salmon has an MA in art history from the University of Glasgow, along with an Honours background in mathematics. He moved to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1997.

Journalism

He began blogging in 1999 for the wire service Bridge News, and later worked for noted economist Nouriel Roubini.

The American Statistical Association presented Salmon with the 2010 Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award "for his body of work, which exemplifies the highest standards of scientific reporting. His insightful use of statistics as a tool to understanding the world of business and economics, areas that are critical in today's economy, sets a new standard in statistical investigative reporting."

Salmon published an article in Wired magazine on 27 December 2010 explaining high-frequency trading on Wall Street. This was followed by an interview on NPR; the program aired on 13 January 2011.

Since May 10, 2014, Salmon has been the host of Slate magazine's weekly Slate Money podcast along with regular Slate financial columnist Jordan Weissmann and financial blogger Cathy O'Neil.

Economic and financial commentary

After the 2007–2008 global financial crisis was well under way, Salmon argued that the CDO market could theoretically suffer a crisis as a result of subprime mortgage defaults cascading into defaults in the senior tranches of a CDO, and that such an occurrence could then result in a freeze in the credit markets. However, he denied that this eventuality could be predicted beforehand through a priori methods.

Salmon emphasizes financial deregulation, oversized financial conglomerates, excessive faith in financial models and efficiency of markets as well as regulatory incompetence as being major contributors to the global financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession.

Salmon's views on what economic policy the government should take in order to solve the jobs crisis are ideologically in-line with those of the Keynesian resurgence. Specifically, he is an advocate of further stimulus spending by the federal government, arguing that America's economic institutions have failed to respond effectively to the crisis, and that the benefits of improving America's infrastructure and hiring public workers far outweigh the federal government's low borrowing costs during the period of the Eurozone debt crisis.

Salmon has argued that there is no regulatory solution that is capable of dealing with the risks to society posed by the too-big-to-fail banking conglomerates and extremely complex financial innovations of the modern market. Rather, he argues that real reform requires that the "financial behemoths" be broken up into much smaller pieces in order to reduce the incentive for – and ability of – financial institutions to "fraudulently game the system." However, he does not expect that this will occur anytime soon.

As Japan copes with the aftermath of the earthquake in Tōhoku, he encouraged people not to donate money to single-emergency or developing country-based NGOs because of perceived logistical issues during the 2010 Haiti relief efforts, instead arguing that Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, the Red Cross and public-sector solutions would be more effective.

His commentary on the long-running sovereign debt dispute between Elliott Management Corporation and the government of Argentina was featured on a 2014 episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.