Here’s something interesting I just learned from the Social Security Administration’s website: There are 70 women aged 25 or younger in this country who are earning Social Security benefits as the spouses of retired workers. To qualify, they must be married to men 62 or older and have children 16 or younger, or older children [...]
I feel remiss amiss for not having addressed this important subject before. But I guess I’ll just leave it to Mr. Juggles at Long or Short Capital: Time and time again, people say we are running out of 2007. These cries began as early as January; by July, some were even claiming that there was [...]
LA Times business columnist David Lazarus argues this week that newspapers are crazy to be giving away all that valuable information they produce (via Romenesko): Newspapers, including this one, give away the store online, all the while wringing their hands about declining revenue and circulation. Everyone says the Net represents the future of journalism, and [...]
As part of what I guess is now a continuing series of excerpts from ancient alumni publications, here’s some stuff from Alfred Winslow Jones, the man generally credited with inventing the hedge fund. He didn’t, really: In the 1920s, Benjamin Graham ran a limited investment partnership that bought some stocks and sold others short–the distinguishing [...]
Like I said, I’m working on cleaning up my book manuscript this week. While doublechecking something in my notes on Alfred Cowles III, a Chicago Tribune heir and major figure in the rise of the efficient market hypothesis, I came across a paragraph I had written down from the Dec. 1918 issue of The Eavesdropper, [...]
Since I’m on a work slowdown and people are having so much fun commenting on my most recent post on tax cuts and government revenues, I thought I’d recycle a something I wrote in October 2006 when this blog was over at CNNMoney.com and hardly any of you folks were reading it: I got an [...]
I’ve got no column in the current Time, and I won’t be in the next issue either (Person of the Year). Then we’re taking a week off from magazine making before returning with an issue the first week of January. I’ve been using the time to yes, yet again, try to make my book manuscript [...]
The comment screening software here seems to have gone hyperactive in the past few days, and has been shunting lots of perfectly legit comments (especially but not exclusively those with links) into the junk file. The folks at Time.com don’t know why it’s happening, so I can’t guarantee a fix. But I will try to [...]
Calculated Risk has gotten the latest numbers from Fed economist James Kennedy on net equity extraction (the spending money that Americans pulled out of mortgage refinancings and home equity loans) in the third quarter of this year. It was $133 billion, or 5.2% of disposable personal income. Which is way down from 2004-2006, but still [...]
On Tuesday the Congressional Budget Office released its latest estimates of how much of their incomes Americans of various income groups fork over in taxes (pdf; xls). Here’s a graphic represention: There’s something in this chart for everybody–the rich pay much more of their income in taxes than anybody else, but they’ve also been able [...]
