So after all the worrying, the first weekend of Christmas shopping turned out to be … okay. From CNNMoney: The National Retail Federation (NRF), an industry trade group, said shoppers spent $41 billion in the 4-day Thanksgiving weekend. The average shopper spent $372.57, up 7.2% from the $347.55 spent last year. What we’ve seen so [...]

The future seems especially uncertain at the moment. There are those who would object that the future is always uncertain, and that it is when we think we’ve captured it in our forecasting models that we’ve invariably gotten things terribly wrong. But still, it is possible most of the time to be reasonably confident that [...]

There’s an article with my name on it in the new issue of TIME (with Michelle Rhee on the cover). My involvement with it was extremely limited–Massimo Calabresi and Michael Duffy in the Washington bureau did almost all the work–but it seemed rude to ask to have my byline removed. Plus, it’s a perfectly good [...]

That’s the view from the front door of the house in semi-upstate New York that the Curious Capitalists have rented and stuffed with assorted in-laws for Thanksgiving. Happily, the house is well insulated. Here’s hoping your turkey is well brined, salted, seasoned, whatever. Even if you live outside the Thanksgiving zone.

In the opening chapter of his great history of the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple, William Greider describes Jimmy Carter’s choice of Paul Volcker as Fed chairman in 1979 in epochal terms: At that moment, few in the White House appreciated what would become obvious in the next few years, that this was the [...]

The President-elect has announced the appointment of yet another slate of high-profile economic advisers, the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, with Paul Volcker as chairman and long-time Obama guy  Austan Goolsbee as the head staff guy. So there’s that, the National Economic Council headed by Larry Summers, the Council on Economic Advisers headed by Christina [...]

Maybe it’s because I’m an “economic leader.” At least, that’s what it says on the cover of this new book: The book grew out of the Creative Capitalism blog that Michael Kinsley and Conor Clarke organized over the summer. My contribution was previously posted here. Making a book out of a blog seemed kind of [...]

Jason Zweig, one of the best financial journos out there, went to town on conspicuous consumption today. Seriously, until you don’t have enough money to take public transportation, do not try to bellyache about your stock-market losses around Jason. His piece, entitled “What a Bear Market Might Teach Us,” is part of a burgeoning discourse [...]

For all those people out there who want to know why they’re not seeing more of this government bailout money directed at ordinary folk, boy do I have an acronym for you. Meet TALF, the Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility. This morning the Treasury Department announced that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York [...]