Regular readers are well aware that Barbara and I really hate assigning deep meanings to daily stock market movements, and when we are pressed into doing so by our editors we usually respond by writing about volatility. But today’s 889-point rise in the Dow really takes the cake. There is no plausible explanation for why [...]

The new S&P/Case-Shiller house-price numbers came out today. They’re for August, so the onset of full-on financial panic in September isn’t reflected, but the news was bad enough: The pace of decline had slowed sharply in April and May and stayed low through July, but now appears to be on the rise again. That may [...]

Since I’ve become something of a volatility junky, let me point you to this interesting FT article that describes how volatility is wreaking havoc on the way financial firms value their assets. An excerpt: The second, more tangible implication of the return of volatility relates to the models that banks and hedge funds use to [...]

I have a brief quote in my new column on the Keynes comeback from the University of Chicago’s Robert Lucas, who in 1980 declared Keynesianism not just dead but laughable (“At research seminars, people don’t take Keynesian theorizing seriously anymore; the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another.”) and later won a Nobel [...]