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 [...]

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 [...]

First came the Great TIME.com Blog Crash of 2008. Then I spent Monday as the Nauseous Capitalist, and really didn’t feel up to posting. I still don’t feel great but here, finally, is a perfunctory post linking to my latest column. It begins: We are all Keynesians now. It’s a phrase that entered public discourse [...]

Yeah, so all the Time blogs were out for a day or so. And now we’re all moving to WordPress from Movable Type and the blog will have new address (http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/) and all commenters will have to reregister. Not sure what happens with the RSS feed. I’ll find that out on Monday. It’s all a [...]

Faithful TIME.com blog-readers may have noticed something odd today: the blogs kind of disappeared. Long story short, we’ve had major server problems, and as a result we’ve had to re-launch all of our blogs on WordPress. The upside is a faster, better, more stable platform. The downside is we’ll need a few days to get [...]