On Tuesday night, your local PBS station will be airing (probably around 9) a FRONTLINE documentary called Inside the Meltdown that is by all appearances the most in-depth attempt so far to explain our little crisis on video. From the preview clips available for viewing on the site (I’d embed one but WordPress has chosen [...]
This is the view from my window in the exurbs of Park City, Utah. The photo was taken at sunrise yesterday, so there are no pretty pink clouds on view as I look right now. But it’s still a nice view. I’m on vacation this week, but I’m working today because TIME’s crack ad sales [...]
Happy Presidents Day from western PA! I am here, about an hour south of Pittsburgh, to help my grandmother pack up her house. Her house–which she sold after it was on the market for two weeks. So maybe I’m not that smart after all. I guess it’s still true that all real estate is local. And [...]
A very interesting tale from the blog of Tim McGuire, the former editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune who now teaches at Arizona State: Most people believe this is an industry implosion none of us could have ever imagined. Well that’s not really true. The Cowles family imagined it and after years of strong stewardship [...]
Step 1. Know what has—and hasn’t—worked in the past. Friends of the Curious Capitalist will be familiar with how much I like to go on and on about how there’s no good data showing which sorts of mortgage rewrites keep struggling borrowers out of foreclosure in the long-term. And how it would be nice, before [...]
Paul Krugman, glomming on to the Failed Presidency of Barack Obama meme originated earlier this week by the FT’s Martin Wolf, writes in his column today: So far the Obama administration’s response to the economic crisis is all too reminiscent of Japan in the 1990s: a fiscal expansion large enough to avert the worst, but [...]
I have a column online and in the issue of TIME with faith healing on the cover. It begins: Don’t spend more than you make. Don’t buy things you don’t need. Save for a rainy day. If Americans had followed these simple rules over the past decade, there would be no financial crisis, no worst-since-the-1930s [...]
Brad DeLong, responding to my post on The uncertainty of stimulus, offers A Guide for the Perplexed Justin Fox on Fiscal Policy. His basic point is that World War II proved beyond a reasonable doubt that fiscal stimulus can work: Demand expansion–deliberate attempts by governments to put the unemployed back to work by deficit spending [...]
Seems GE is going to start paying its employees to quit smoking. There’s been a fair amount of (inconclusive) research about whether paying people to quit smoking—or lose weight, or eat better—works in the long-run. Apparently, this study, conducted with GE employees and published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, convinced the folks up [...]
Barbara and I both participated, not entirely unwillingly, in TIME’s group effort to pick 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis. It was initially conceived as a Web project (at first we were going to try for a list of 75, but that just seemed way too tiring, both for us and for readers), [...]
