Harvard economist Martin Feldstein is calling it quits after 30 years of running the National Bureau of Economic Research. I think this is a really big deal: Feldstein took over a mostly moribund NBER in 1977 and established it as possibly the most important arbiter–certainly more important than any one academic journal–of what constituted respectable, [...]

Back in July, in Countrywide Financial’s quarterly earnings conference call, CEO Angelo Mozilo uttered these memorable words: Nobody saw this coming. S&P and Moody’s didn’t see it coming, but they simply just downgrade bonds, they don’t take hits. Bear Stearns certainly didn’t see it coming. Merrill Lynch didn’t see it coming. Nobody saw this coming. [...]

I know that mocking the nation’s real estate trade organizations for their perpetual sunny optimism in the face of bad news has been getting mighty fashionable lately–maybe too fashionable. But this little item from the National Association of Realtors’ house publication is just too precious to ignore: University of Florida study released this week paints [...]

The August drop in employment that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning surprised a lot of people. You can’t really blame them: It was the first monthly decline since 2003, the numbers had been moderately strong in recent months, and the survey was conducted in the first half of the month, missing a [...]

I put together this chart for my column this week, but it was (correctly) deemed too confusing for Time readers. On the assumption that readers of this blog are a hardier breed, here it is: The idea was to investigate whether stock market volatility had risen or fallen as professional investors (mutual funds, pension funds, [...]

My new column is up online and in the issue of Time with General Petraeus on the cover. It begins: In 1951, Princeton economics major Jack Bogle wrote a senior thesis extolling the virtues of the small but growing mutual-fund industry. At the time the reigning view of the stock market was that expressed 1 [...]

I’ve written in the pages of Time that this country should think about emulating the excellent Dutch pension system. Now Gautam Naik reports in the W$J that we might want to take a close look at the how the country does health care as well: Since a new system took effect here last year, cost [...]

Who cares about that Nardelli guy? This strikes me as a far more interesting hire by Chrysler/Cerberus: James Press, the former head of Toyota’s North American operations, has been hired by Chrysler. He will share the titles of vice chairman and president with former Chrysler chief executive Tom LaSorda. “Tom LaSorda and I are thrilled [...]

From an article in this morning’s NYT about proposed legislation on the way from the chairmen of the House and Senate banking committees: The Democratic proposals would attack several practices that advocacy groups for low-income homeowners have singled out. The first is prepayment penalties, which are rare for borrowers with good credit but common among [...]