Business Week‘s Michael Mandel has this to say about the economy’s apparent resilience: [W]e now may be in a world of mini-recessions–sharp falls in one or two sectors which do not pull down the whole economy. Think about the different parts of the economy as being connected by springs (or slinkys, if you want). A [...]

Lex Hoogduin, chief economist for the big Dutch money manager Robeco (and columnist for Het Financieele Dagblad) stopped by this morning. Among the things he said was that when he makes a presentation in the U.S., he usually gets questions that seem aimed making him come out with a sunnier forecast than he really means [...]

Design by Curious Capitalist Jr. Carving by me.

The headline number in the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices released this morning was that U.S. home prices dropped 4.4% in the 12 months ending in August. But it’s in the metropolitan-area details that the Case-Shiller data gets really interesting. So with the help of Time.com graphics whiz Feilding Cage, I charted them: Pretty cool, huh? [...]

More than a day after the WSJ and NYT declared in no uncertain terms that he was out, Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal finally “retired” this morning. I was starting to wonder if O’Neal might be staging some sort of rearguard save-my-job action, but I guess it just took time to negotiate a cushy enough [...]

After I wrote a couple weeks ago that New York was at a disadvantage to London as a financial center because getting through immigration as a foreigner at JFK is so much more unpleasant than at Heathrow, Financial Times columnist (and now blogger!) John Gapper has this to report: When I arrived in London, I [...]

The Indian media are reporting that, only a few months after Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu passed up Bill Gates to become the richest man on earth, Slim has already lost that distinction. From The Economic Times: Following a strong share price rally on in his three group companies, India’s most valued firm Reliance Industries, Reliance [...]

I’ll be doing one of my regular commentaries on the Nightly Business Report on PBS tonight. It’s about Microsoft, and how being unfashionable hasn’t kept it from making insane amounts of money. I taped it this morning with watery eyes, a scratchy throat, and a nose red from being blown every couple of minutes for [...]

I’ve got two questions after the NFL’s first-ever regular-season visit to Europe on Sunday (the Giants beat the Dolphins 13-10 in London): Does anybody think American football will ever have sustained mass appeal outside the North American continent? And if not, is it really worth the NFL’s money to go to all this effort to [...]