John McCain promises, in an exciting new 15-page briefing paper that you can download as a pdf or consume in video form, that he’s going to balance the federal budget in just four years: John McCain will balance the budget by the end of his first term. The near-term path to balance is built on [...]
I already knew that the subprime mortgage boom of 2003-2006 had taken a lot of business away from the Federal Housing Administration. But looking through the actual numbers in a June 2007 GAO report on the FHA’s declining market share (pdf!) was still a revelation. In the housing bubble epicenters of Arizona, California, and Nevada [...]
Guinea pigs are pretty cool, Justin, but I spent my weekend reading the Harvard Business Review. Now who’s the sad one? The article you want to check out in the July-August issue is the one in which Anita Elberse calls into question the whole notion of the long tail. Elberse, an associate prof at HBS, [...]
The Bretton Woods system of managed currencies unraveled in the early 1970s, leaving a decade of economic trouble in its wake. In recent years there’s been a lot of talk of Bretton Woods II, the informal setup in which emerging market countries link their currencies to the dollar. That arrangement is of course under a [...]
