Gas prices are high at the moment, the highest they’ve been (adjusting for inflation) since all-time records were set back in 1981. Crude oil prices are high, too, but they were even higher last summer. What’s up with that? The word on Capitol Hill is that refiners and gas retailers are gouging us–the House even [...]

The second version of the first quarter GDP numbers were released this morning, and they mark the economy down to a 0.6% annual growth rate from the 1.3% rate estimated back on April 27. If that gets knocked down a little more when the “final” version comes out June 28, then ratcheted down even more [...]

Curious Capitalist Jr. has asked me to write a post about his friend’s older brother, Paul Lindseth, who made it to the quarterfinals of the 80th Scripps National Spelling Bee today before meeting his Waterloo in the word “oubliette.” Which apparently means “a concealed dungeon having a trap door in the ceiling as its only [...]

My neighbor Nathan Thornburgh (we share an office wall here at Time) has a fascinating article about guest worker programs in North Carolina in the current issue of the magazine that ends on this decidedly subversive note: So what’s the solution? One clue can be found in the failed amnesty of 1986, widely viewed as [...]

The president’s choice of Bob Zoellick to be the new World Bank chief seems pretty obvious after the fact. He’s a loyal Bush soldier rather than an out-on-a-limb advocate like Wolfowitz, which means he’s less controversial among administration critics yet more likely to actually do what the administration wants, whatever that might be. Perhaps most [...]

A special treat for the millions of German-speaking Curious Capitalist readers: An interview I did with the Austrian daily Der Standard about Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones bid. I don’t think there’s much of anything in it I haven’t already said in this blog, so I won’t bother translating. But here’s a thrilling excerpt. DER STANDARD: [...]

Curious Capitalist regular Peter Varhol had an interesting comment on my China column. An excerpt: I’ve always been confused by the spend versus save debate … What is bizarre, I think, is that while economists and economic writers such as yourself bemoan the lack of savings behavior in the US, tax policy decidedly supports spending [...]

I spent the weekend in a house full of old books. One of them was the Fiftieth Anniversary Report of Harvard’s Class of 1922, where I found this remarkable statement from Hartford lawyer/art-collector Joseph Louis Shulman: To allow myself two regrets, one is that my wife has not been with me the past ten years, [...]

From the always excellent Bill Powell in Shanghai: About 18 months ago, Liu Junling, an upwardly mobile single Chinese woman, had a conversation with her boss, the CEO of a large, politically connected real estate developer in Shanghai. For the previous five years, people in China’s largest city had lived and breathed the property market—buying [...]