My newest dead-tree effort is in the issue with Barack Obama on the cover and online here. It begins: It’s the day after Thanksgiving at Aventura Mall, north of Miami, and David Weinberg is worrying about the economy. “People are underestimating the downturn in the housing market in Florida and are spending based on home [...]

In response to popular demand (well, one commenter asked for it), I’ve put together what I promise will be my last multi-colored Case-Shiller housing price chart for a while, this time with the price indices adjusted for inflation: This chart gives me the opportunity to explore something that Curious Capitalist reader Richard “Creative Class” Florida [...]

Thus writeth Willem “Maverecon” Buiter of the London School of Economics and FT.com: From the point of view of the efficient allocation of resources in the medium and long term, the relative (probably even absolute in the short run) contraction in the size of the financial sectors of the advanced industrial countries is a desirable [...]

Here, as promised, is what the chart looks like for the 14 metropolitan areas for which the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices go all the way back to 1987 (that is, before the last real estate bust, which sure doesn’t look all that dramatic on the chart, except maybe in LA): A couple of comments: First, [...]

My friend Jeff Gordinier has a totally brilliant Q&A with John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) up on Conde Nast’s men.style.com. (I presume there’s a shorter version in the new Details magazine, but Peter Carlson of the Washington Post says reading that will make you stinky). Anyway, it took me a while [...]

The new Case-Shiller house price numbers are out today, and as you’ve probably already heard, they’re ugly. But they can be made pretty, and I got so much attention from other blogs the last time Time.com graphics czar Feilding Cage and I did this chart that I figured I had to post the updated version. [...]

With all the recent talk of a looming recession, I figured I ought to check in with Stanford economist Robert Hall, chairman of the Business-Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the semi-official arbiter of when recessions start and end. I e-mailed: When everybody starts talking recession, as is this case now, [...]

With the news that the stock market is now officially in “correction” territory (it’s down 10% since October), I thought it might be interesting to check how bad things look if you adjust for the decline in the dollar. So I adjusted the S&P 500′s performance this year to reflect the value of the dollar [...]

Menzie Chinn, who has been keeping an eagle eye out for signs that the rapid shrinkage of the federal deficit since 2004 might be coming to an end, finds them in the Monthly Treasury Statement for October. Tax receipts have clearly stopped growing as a share of GDP. Writes Chinn: Seems to me a fair [...]