Time‘s infographics czar, Jackson Dykman, put together some very cool charts to accompany the print version of my new article on real estate. But my favorite among his creations was one we didn’t put in the magazine: In case you’re one to read the fine print, ignore the thing in the chart credit about “rolling [...]
Yesterday I posted a chart comparing the intended Federal funds rate set by the Federal Open Market Committee with the actual average interest rate that U.S. banks are charging each other for overnight loans. Since early August, the actual rate has been substantially lower than the intended one. It turned out CondeNast Portfolio blogger Felix [...]
I’ve got a big article about the real estate slump online and in the new issue of Time, which inexplicably features presidential candidates’ spouses on the cover instead of, well, real estate (although I’ll admit that the scoop about Bill and Hill loving Grey’s Anatomy is bigger than anything I came up with). It begins: [...]
Everybody’s waiting to see if the Federal Open Market Committee decides to cut interest rates on Tuesday. But as the chart below shows, the Federal funds rate has already more or less cut itself: I’m not entirely sure what the significance of this is. I imagine it’s a function of the guys at the open [...]
Greg Mankiw links to this paper (warning: pdf) by Washington University economics grad student Charles Courtemanche (he says on his Website that he’s on the job market), who contends: that an additional $1 in real gasoline prices would reduce obesity in the U.S. by 15% after five years, and that 13% of the rise in [...]
The Project for Excellence in Journalism has done an interesting, if not particularly surprising, analysis of the “news agenda” of user news sites like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us (via Romenesko). Among the findings: The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the stories [...]
Mrs. Curious Capitalist, talking yesterday about the paralyzing injury to Buffalo Bill Kevin Everett, wondered if someday football would retreat to the sidelines of American sports, its terrible health consequences for so many players ruling it out as a game for with appeal for regular folks. After all, boxing used to be the most popular [...]
This just in from the W$J: Mohamed El-Erian, head of the company that manages Harvard University’s $35 billion endowment, is resigning from that position to return to Pacific Investment Management Co. Mr. El-Erian will start at Pimco in January as the Newport Beach, Ca.-based firm’s first co-Chief Investment Officer and Co-Chief Executive Officer. The move [...]
Merrill Lynch’s Richard Bernstein is one of the few investment strategists on Wall Street whose writings are worth paying close attention to. Back in January, for example, he wrote this about how financial markets would eventually be shaken from their complacency: We view financial risk much like popcorn popping in a microwave. Until the first [...]
Felix Salmon really hates entertainer/economist/half-informed-pontificator Ben Stein’s column in the Sunday New York Times business section (actually, I suspect that there’s a love/hate thing going on there, but whatever). This Sunday, Stein wrote: Owning your own home is generally considered the bedrock of the American dream, so this is a good thing, both socially and [...]
