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 [...]
Three years ago, when the personal saving rate (that is, disposable personal income minus personal outlays, usually expressed as a percentage of disposable personal income) briefly dipped below zero, it was easy to find economists willing to downplay the significance. David Malpass, then of Bear Stearns, was probably the most prominent low-saving-denialist. As he wrote [...]
For much of the past year, Ben Bernanke has caught a lot of flack for being too soft on inflation. Journalists mocked the Fed’s apparent reliance on core inflation, which ignored the big food and energy price hikes that were of most interest to consumers. Many economists–and a couple of Federal Reserve Bank presidents–worried that [...]
The fun fact of the morning, from Merrill Lynch emerging markets dude Michael Hartnett: You can buy the entire free float of China and India with today’s market cap of Volkswagen, and still have enough spare change to buy Turkey. With VW’s stock price down 42% so far today as the Great Porsche Short Squeeze [...]
