I’ve got a new column online and in the issue of TIME with a fraying rope on the cover. It’s not entirely new—bits of it already appeared in a TIME.com piece I wrote Tuesday—and what I really want to talk about are the other economy-related pieces in the magazine: There’s David von Drehle’s wrenching House [...]
I’m not an unalloyed fan of Henry Blodget as a business journalist. He’s a smart guy and a good writer, but he has a tendency to go for bold statements that represent not so much the sum total of his thinking as the sum total of his desire to make an impression (this was true [...]
I just wrote a quick piece for TIME.com on this morning’s GDP release. The conclusion, for those who’d prefer to skip all the numbers and stuff: Unless it ends suddenly tomorrow, all signs are that this will stack up as the worst economic downturn in the U.S. since the Great Depression. But if government spending [...]
Richard Katz, who knows a whole lot more about Japan than I do, writes in the new Foreign Affairs that likening our government’s handling of the financial crisis so far to Japan in the 1990s is balderdash: It took the Bank of Japan nearly nine years to bring the overnight interest rate from its 1991 [...]
The very first tax hike (or proposed tax hike) of the Obama era can be found on page 29 of Jumpstarting the Economy and Investing for the Future (pdf!) the main document of the fiscal 2010 budget “outline” released by the White House Office of Management and Budget this morning. Here it is, verbatim: The [...]
The number of people claiming unemployment benefits for the first time jumped again last week, to 667,000, with the number of people receiving unemployment for more than one week hitting 5.1 million—the highest percentage of the workforce doing so since July 1983. If you’re tired of hearing those figures go up week after week, you [...]
President Obama’s brief speech about the future of financial regulation this afternoon was pretty vague. But we’re been starting to see a clear pattern from this administration: Vague opening statement, such Tim Geithner’s much-criticized (not by me!) non-unveiling of his Financial Stability Plan two weeks, followed in pretty quick succession by details and action. (The [...]
Check out this interactive graphic on USAToday.com. As Justin mentioned, I’ve been traveling, which means this morning I read USA Today cover-to-cover. (Thank you, Fairfield Inn!) That’s where I came across this piece, by Brad Heath, which tells us that even in 2007 nearly a tenth of all borrowers were taking on mortgages worth more [...]
Joel Stein joins the Rick Santelli bandwagon in a column that I think will be in the next issue of TIME but is already online. It’s far more reasoned and charming than the now famous Santelli rant, although I still disagree with the conclusion. The biggest revelation is that Joel appears to have paid $1.12 [...]
I’ve got an article on bank nationalization and the like up on TIME.com. My column for the magazine is going to be an outgrowth of it, so any editorial suggestions will be accepted gratefully (if not necessarily followed).
