My column this week begins with this image: The giant ships from Asia steam into the Southern California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach laden with flat-screen TVs, flip-flops, copying machines, nail clippers, Thomas the Tank Engines and all the other necessities of modern life. They leave port a few days later loaded mainly [...]

I have a column in the issue of Time with a fire alarm on the cover, and online here. It begins: The giant ships from Asia steam into the Southern California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach laden with flat-screen TVs, flip-flops, copying machines, nail clippers, Thomas the Tank Engines and all the other [...]

We all know the U.S. is running a big trade deficit. Has been for years. We also know that the U.S. imports a lot of oil, the price of which has been going up staggeringly fast lately. But how much of a factor is oil in the trade deficit? A really big factor, it turns [...]

Tysons Corner, located just outside the Beltway in Northern Virginia’s Fairfax County, is the largest commercial district in Virginia and the 15th largest in the nation. It is one of the great American economic success stories of the postwar era, and is typical of the “Edge Cities” (or “technoburbs,” or–to be entirely prosaic about it–”suburban [...]

The Corporate Library released early results of its annual CEO pay survey this morning. The takeaway: CEOs of big companies get richer. CEOs of less-big companies don’t even keep up with inflation. Consider: For the 380 CEOs who were in post for the whole of 2006 and 2007, the median increase in total actual compensation [...]

I’ve been spending some time perusing the Census Bureau’s foreign trade statistics. You can learn some remarkable things there. Such as that the U.S. is running dizzying surpluses in spacecraft ($150 million in exports to just about nothing in imports in the first three months of this year) and hides and skins ($426 million to [...]

Back in March I blogged about the interesting and “mildly disturbing” tendency of Federal Reserve governors to bail out long before their terms expire. Now Fed governor Frederic Mishkin has announced that he’ll be returning to his teaching job at Columbia after just under two years of making monetary policy. That’s not quite a record: [...]

From Blaine Harden in today’s Washington Post: Jerome White Jr. wears a do-rag while crooning syrupy ballads — in perfect Japanese — about lost love. Part Public Enemy, part Sinatra, part schmaltz, it’s an act the Japanese public has never seen before, and it is making him a star. Jero, as he is marketed here, [...]

That’s the positive spin. The latest S&P/Case-Shiller home-price numbers (pdf) are out. I may put together a pretty chart later, but I’ve got a column to write today. The headline is that the national home price index, which they only calculate once a quarter, is down 14.1% for the year ending in March. That’s, um, [...]