This morning The Daily Deal told me that Wallstrip has a little West Coast competition. I don’t know if I’d go that far. Jesse Draper, recent UCLA theater grad, cable TV actress, and, oh yeah, daughter of venture capitalist Tim Draper (see, for context: Hotmail, Skype, Baidu), is Valley Girl (original and timely), a big-smiled, [...]

Grisly news today from the Federal Reserve’s July survey of senior bank loan officers. Loan-writing standards are tighter across the board, but especially for prime mortgages (74% of banks reported tighter standards, compared to 62% in the April survey), and credit card loans (67% of banks reported tighter standards, compared to 32% in the April [...]

My colleague Jim Poniewozik’s epic post about why he didn’t write about the John Edwards affair sooner got me to thinking about a story I haven’t yet shepherded into print—the rent-ratio heat maps at Hotpads.com. Okay, not exactly equivalent, but I wanted an excuse to mention Jim’s amazing post, which was eye-opening even to someone [...]

I couldn’t help but notice over the weekend that there are some people in China playing some games. But what, I found myself asking, will it all mean for GDP? Brad Humphreys, a professor of economics at the University of Alberta, who co-authors a blog about the economics of sports, sheds some light on that [...]

I am about to leave on the Curious Capitalist family’s annual California vacation. Won’t be back in the office until August 25. I may do a couple posts from the road, or at least put up some pretty pictures, but basically this will be Barbara’s blog for the next couple of weeks. I told her [...]

Here’s what fueled much or maybe most of Wall Street’s growth over the last few years: Investment banks (and by that I also mean the investment banking arms of giant banks like Citigroup and UBS) found ever more ways to sell gobs of risky securities while a) telling the buyers they weren’t risky, in many [...]

Thanks to the falling prices of used vehicles, especially trucks and SUVs, GM and Ford are scaling back their leasing programs, and Chrysler is getting out of the game altogether. This morning I had a chat with Sergio Stiberman, the CEO of LeaseTrader.com, and he had some interesting data from the secondary market. LeaseTrader.com is [...]

I’ve tried to make the case before that the horrible times afflicting the nation’s metropolitan daily newspapers have far more to do with the collapse of a monopoly distribution model than with the quality of reporting in those newspapers. But now Paul Davis, publisher of the weekly Tuskegee News in Alabama, is making me do [...]

I did a bunch of interviews for my Hank Paulson article that didn’t make it into the piece. One of the most interesting was with William L. Silber, the Marcus Nadler Professor of Finance and Economics at NYU’s Stern School. Silber is the author of When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis [...]