I know, I know, I’m not a political blogger and I’m not supposed to be doing anything but working on my book this week. But I was thinking in the shower this morning (no kiddin’) about whether long service on Capitol Hill, in particular in the Senate, is the kiss of death for a presidential [...]

See, I said there’d be pictures! “Pre-war,” in New York real estate parlance, means anything built before the 1940s. This sign, in case you can’t tell, adorns a hole in the ground. I assume that what the developers are trying to say is that the building they’re putting up will look like the surrounding apartment [...]

I know, I know, I promised to make no more mention of The Myth of the Rational Market until I had finished the manuscript. But my failure to finish things up over the past few weeks has motivated me to take the rest of this week off to work on it. So apart from maybe [...]

This was part of a mailing full of blank checks that I got from credit card purveyor Capital One on Saturday. By my reckoning, only one of these proposed uses of credit (“Build a deck”) is a genuine capital expenditure. Four more (“Have your house repainted,” “Buy a new TV,” “Join a gym,” and maybe [...]

Craig Newmark is a big fan of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which aims to fight the insanity of the beauty-industrial complex while selling lots of cleansing products. Such a big fan that he says he’s offered some advice to the people at Unilever/Dove and its ad agency, Ogilvy and Mather: Take an ad in [...]

I have a column in the new Time with Hillary C. and Barry O. on the cover and online here. It begins: For decades, scholars have been churning out studies on the impact the economy has on presidential elections. The not-very-surprising message of most of them: economic trouble is bad news for the party that [...]

The WSJ has a story today about how the global credit crunch is pounding the UK economy. One passage caught my eye: According to the most recent data from Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, total consumer debt in the U.K. stood at 164% of annual disposable income at the end of 2006, by [...]

And now, as promised, my e-mail from Gilles Saint-Paul of the Université des Sciences Sociales de Toulouse in response to my question about why economists outside the U.S. seem to think we need a recession while economists within argue that we need to do whatever we can to fight it. The U.S. economy does not [...]

From an e-mail I got a few minutes ago from the Moody’s Training Services Group: UPCOMING MOODY’S TRAINING SEMINARS Learn how to stay on top of risk from one of the world’s most qualified sources RISK Understand, Measure, Manage …. From “Archaeology of the Crisis,” the angst-ridden January 2008 report by Moody’s chief international economist [...]