My friend Vanessa Friedman, who has the incongruous title of fashion editor of the Financial Times, has a new video up on the FT site. It’s kind of long, and weirdly serious in tone, but the story Vanessa tells is fascinating: Japanese consumers, who have kept the global luxury-brand business going for the past 20-odd [...]

Almost every recounting of the Great Santa Barbara Oil Spill of 1969 mentions that it was on (or under) Union Oil’s Platform A that the blowout occurred. But hardly anyone ever mentions that, a few weeks after the leak was fixed, Platform A was put into service for the first time, and has been pumping [...]

Yesterday’s “Daily Article” on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website, by economist and Abe-Lincoln-hater Thomas DiLorenzo, is titled “TIME for Socialism.” It begins: Anyone who is still wondering why the so-called “mainstream media” was so hostile toward Congressman Ron Paul’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination will find an answer in the June 2 issue [...]

Daniel Gross has a new piece in Slate on the economic boomtown that is Houston: In May, the unemployment rate in the nation’s sixth-largest metropolitan area was a measly 3.8 percent. In the past year, Houston-based companies, which include 26 Fortune 500 firms, added 71,000 jobs to their payrolls. The local United Way closed out [...]

I’d never heard of the classic 1957 BBC April Fool’s report on the Swiss spaghetti harvest before a friend brought it up at dinner a couple of night ago. Shows what a joke my education was. Anyway, here it is:

Some fun facts just in from JP Morgan’s economics team (I can’t find it online, but it presumably will show up eventually here): * Emerging market economies accounted for the majority of global oil consumption for the first time in 2007 * Oil consumption was actually down in the developed world in both 2006 and [...]

My new column is online and in the issue of Time with the excellent cover story about a fence by the Next Editor of the Washington Post (well, maybe) inside. It begins: Last October, I stood in the back of a packed Manhattan ballroom listening to hedge-fund manager David Einhorn explain to an audience what [...]

Here’s the beginning of that story I mentioned yesterday: Nearly 9% of all U.S. mortgages–or 4.8 million loans–are past due or in some stage of foreclosure. So when a company claims to offer distressed homeowners both relief from their mortgages and revenge against the bankers who saddled them with too much debt (“Give the lenders [...]

In a comment to my post on offshore drilling, odograph writes (and my Dad agrees): If I could ask reporters to do one thing, it would be to always frame coastal reserves in terms of current consumption. There is a strong (predictably irrational?) tendency to only mention the one-time gift this oil might give us [...]