Dan Gross wonders about Wal-Mart’s latest clumsy effort to help the Republicans: Wal-Mart’s brass plainly believes—no, know—that a Republican president would be good for Wal-Mart, while a Democrat would be bad. Despite Clinton’s Arkansas roots, most Wal-Mart executives probably opposed Clinton in both his successful campaigns. But during his presidency, Wal-Mart’s stock more than tripled. [...]
I figure I’ve blathered on enough about windfall profits taxes, so how about another proposal in Obama’s energy plan–selling oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? There are 700 million barrels of oil in the SPR–enough to cover just over a month of current U.S. oil consumption, or two months of oil imports. The original [...]
Continuing on Monday’s windfall-profits-taxes-are-hard theme, here’s Australian economist Andrew Leigh (via Mark Thoma): From an economic standpoint, the strongest argument for a windfall tax is that it has the potential to be non-distortionary. A one-off windfall tax levied on past profits should not change firms’ behaviour, since it does not affect future costs and prices. [...]
Today JetBlue said that it will start charging $7 for a pillow and blanket. You get to keep the pillow and blanket, and ostensibly both are clean—marketed, in fact, as “The World’s Cleanest(tm) travel pillow and blanket kit”—but still, this is very sad. Makes me nostalgic for a time I never knew, when air travel [...]
Barack Obama has renewed his call for a windfall profits tax on oil companies. A couple of months ago I said I was about to write something about windfall profits taxes. Never did. Why not? Because windfall- profits-tax opinion pieces are hard. Actually, that’s not quite true. They’re pretty easy if you just focus, to [...]
A 1999 headline in Money magazine asked: He’s Baaack! Garrett Van Wagoner has been a genius, a dolt and a genius. So which is he? Nine years later, Van Wagoner appears to have finally answered the question. From today’s WSJ: Van Wagoner Emerging Growth has consistently disappointed investors, giving it a dubious distinction as the [...]
Bill Gates wrote a story for this week’s issue of the magazine about creative capitalism—his phrase for applying market forces and business know-how to solve the world’s problems, like mass poverty. It’s one part corporate social responsibility (caring about “stakeholders,” not just shareholders), one part Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (poor people become [...]
Mark Zandi, the co-founder and chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, stopped by on Thursday afternoon. He was here to promote his new book, Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis, and Barbara and I will get to that later. But he also moonlights as [...]
Yeah, it’s from Newsweek, but this saga of driving a Hummer in LA is just too good not to link to: After burning a gallon of gas every eight miles, our intrepid car reviewer Tara Weingarten and Business Editor David Jefferson stopped at an outdoor café in the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood, just down the [...]
