Ever since I started at Time in late January, I’ve been neglecting a book project I should have wrapped up a long time ago. So I’m going to devote this week to book work, and my friend Mark Gimein will be stepping in to do a bit of guest blogging. Mark and I worked at [...]

Jeff Lazerson, a mortgage broker and faithful Time reader from Laguna Niguel, Calif., has been bugging me for a while to write about something he’s devised called Mortgage Grader. It’s software that he developed with a grant from the Ford Foundation that essentially uses the credit scoring process that dominates mortgage lending these days on [...]

In the clearest sign yet that the world is about to come to an end, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung–the grayest newspaper I know of on this planet–is going to start running color photos on the front page every day starting Friday. (“Inviting, fresh, clear,” the paper claims of its new look.) The FAZ did run [...]

The W$J’s Heard on the Street column reports that people are thinking the big writedowns at the likes of Citi, UBS and Deutsche Bank may be bigger than the actual losses: When valuing securities that have all but stopped trading, clarity is relative. Some investors say they fully expect banks and brokers to take the [...]

Yesterday it was the GOP’s grip on the business vote: The Republican Party, known since the late 19th century as the party of business, is losing its lock on that title. Today it’s Wal Mart: The Wal-Mart Era, the retailer’s time of overwhelming business and social influence in America, is drawing to a close. What [...]

I had a chat Tuesday with Bruce Bent, the founder and chairman of The Reserve the Reserve Funds and inventor of the money market mutual fund. I wanted to hear what he thought about the mini-panic in money market funds that began in August, when there was talk that some money funds with investments in [...]

From Tom Toles. (Thanks to Mrs. CC for the tip.)

A couple of weeks ago, economist Lena Komileva told me that the only thing that would really get credit markets functioning smoothly again was for the big banks to admit that the mortgage securities they owned were worth an awful lot less than previously reported. That would start a mass downward revaluation of asset-backed securities, [...]

After getting lured last week into critiquing the collection of half-informed non sequiturs that is Ben Stein’s New York Times column (in the comments to a post on Danish killer slugs, of course), I was thrilled to see that I will never have to waste my time on such matters again because Felix Salmon is [...]