Why did the market recover its bearings today? I’m thinking it’s because so many traders were happily playing the Euromoney Champions League of Investment Banking 2007. When I got the e-mail from the London-based financial magazine this morning announcing the new game, I figured it was some sort of investment bank fantasy league, along the [...]

I was on a panel Tuesday discussing “The Dos and Don’ts of Blogging” Tuesday at the Magazine Publishers of America’s annual digital conference. Because I am the Blogspert. Actually, no. It was because Lev Grossman was sick and I was his last-minute replacement. Business Week‘s Heather Green, who co-authors a blog about blogging (!), was [...]

The sermon at my church Sunday was partly about real estate prices. (Is this a uniquely New York thing? Or do men and women of the cloth across the land regularly invoke the housing market?) The rector, a former lawyer who actually owned New York real estate back in the 1970s, said that back in [...]

So the Dow Jones Industrials fell 416 points today, which sounds like an awful lot, but really isn’t anymore. On Black Monday in 1987, a 508 point drop amounted to 23% of the Dow’s value. Today’s drop was just over 3%. Still, there’s reason for there to be worry in the air. None other than [...]

A reader in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, sent me a letter (on paper! with a written in pen!) in response to my column a few weeks back about northern Virginia’s astounding, taxpayer-funded prosperity (“The Federal Job Machine“). Apparently Oshkosh Truck Corp., maker of “the world’s toughest specialty trucks and truck bodies,” is doing famously these days, thanks [...]

We’re more than five years into the current economic expansion, which means it’s entirely natural that we ought to be worrying about when it might end. This expansion has already lasted longer than most of its post-World War II counterparts, after all. Last year a few economists predicted that falling housing prices might send us [...]

Something’s been bothering me about the XM-Sirius merger. Everything I’ve read seems to point to XM being the better-run of the two satellite radio rivals. Hugh Panero, the CEO since 1998, got his company’s radios to market first, signed better distribution deals than Sirius did, and has been running a significantly tighter ship. This morning, [...]

At first the word was he was going to make a quarter of a billion dollars over five years. Then Grant Wahl reported in January that David Beckham’s L.A. Galaxy pay will be more like $50 million over five years. Now the AP tells us his base salary is actually $5.5 million a year. At [...]

There’s no way I can keep up with or be one one-millionth as intelligent and informed as Corliss and Poniewozik, but I feel the call to say something about the Oscars. So here it is: I’m pretty sure it’s BLAN-chut, not blan-SHETT. Back me up on this, Cate.