Almost half of all mortgage holders in Nevada now owe more than their house is worth. Mindboggling to think about. Basically what that means is if you want to sell your house, you’ve got to write a check to the bank on the day you close. Nationwide, the percentage of homeowners with mortgages underwater is [...]

General Motors would like some taxpayer cash—a bit more than $10 billion should do—to help it buy Chrysler. As a company spokesman told TIME: “We believe the Federal government should consider all of the tools available to it—some recently enacted—to support industries that are in distress and that are essential to the U.S. economy.” (Update: [...]

Andrew Samwick (inspired by today’s Krugman column) says he told us so: What we should have done back in January is to start planning for a future in which the consumers, finally, would sensibly retreat (not capitulate) from their debt-laced consumption rampage.  Some people [Samwick, that is] were suggesting the following in January: “[W]e can plan [...]

My new column is up online and in the magazine with McCain and Obama on the cover, together for perhaps one last time. It begins: In 2002 the inimitably audacious editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal brought to the nation’s attention the existence of a vast and allegedly pernicious class of “lucky duckies” who [...]

Okay, so I totally missed this. Here’s Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, talking to the New York Post’s Keith Kelly a little over a week ago: Moore pointed to the recent Time cover story, “How Wall Street Sold Out America,” which was written by Fortune magazine’s top editor, Andy Serwer, and noted economic and Fortune [...]

With the GDP numbers out today we now have all the inputs needed to figure out who’s going to win the presidential election. At least, we have all the inputs needed to run the Fair Model, Yale economist Ray Fair’s GDP- and inflation-based formula for predicting whether the incumbent party holds onto the White House [...]

Bloomberg has a story this morning about how some high-profile hedge fund managers—Steven Cohen, David Einhorn, Paul Singer—are opening up their funds to new investors for the first time in years. Seems they’re having luck raising money, even as many of their peers are being forced to dump positions to meet redemptions. As for what [...]

We finally got another quarter of negative GDP–the first since a year ago. The third-quarter number (-0.3%) will be revised as more data come in over the next couple of months, though, and economist Roger Kubarych of Italo-German superbank Unicredit (whose analysis was the first to land in my e-mail inbox) actually thinks it may [...]

In a break from our regularly scheduled business and economics programming, I offer some notes I just dug up from a conversation I had with Karl Rove about four years ago (on Sept. 10, 2004, to be precise). We were mostly talking about William McKinley (a favorite subject of his) and the urban-oriented majority McKinley [...]