Felix Salmon e-mails saying he wants to hear my explanation for why payroll employment dropped so much more precipitously in the early 1930s than it has in this recession. Here are a couple of thoughts: The initial sharp decline in the last few months of 1929 and first few months of 1930 was simply a [...]
This blog has been falling down lately on its pledge to be America’s Leading Source of News About the Danish Economy™. I failed to link to Bryan Walsh’s excellent TIME article on Danish energy policy. I failed to bring to your attention an Economist story that ranks Denmark as one of the world’s top countries [...]
Writing (and charting) about the latest employment numbers a couple of weeks ago, I concluded that: It’s probably still nowhere near as dramatic a chart as the monthly numbers from 1931 and 1932 would make. But the BLS wasn’t on the case back then. That brought an e-mail from Dartmouth economist Doug Irwin, who told [...]
Reader Patricia Love e-mails: I’m losing money hand over fist. I’m losing it in my 401k (each month, I have less than I had the month before–and that’s after my 15 percent contribution), I’m losing it in my IRA, and I’m losing it in my Roth (neither of these accounts has a huge balance, but [...]
“We’re fair game,” Jim Cramer said early in his conversation with Jon Stewart Thursday night. “We’re a big network. We’ve been out front. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve got 17 hours of live TV a day to do.” “Maybe you could cut down on that,” Stewart suggested. Cramer laughed, Stewart cut to a commercial break, and [...]
Yesterday the Fed came out with its quarterly report on household wealth, showing that we were $11 trillion less rich at the end of 2008 than we were at the end of 2007. Our collective wealth has now dropped six quarters in a row—largely due to declines in stock prices and home values. (I should [...]
The Chinese-official-says-something-worrisome-about-the-dollar-or-Treasuries scare has by now become a pretty regular market phenomenon. What was new about Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s blunt words today were that they were blunter than usual, and that they were being spoken by Wen Jiabao, not a “high-level state economist” or “the government’s foreign exchange regulator.” A sample: We have lent [...]
My column this week is an attempt to explain why we keep bailing out the banks’ bondholders. As often happens with my wonkier columns, I did a lot of research on aspects of the question that turned out to be too arcane for my one page in the magazine. I may force them on the [...]
The Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County, Civil Branch didn’t need any new jurors today. So those of us who weren’t assigned to trials all got out at 11:30, and now we don’t have to go back for six years. Sweet! I was seriously considering just playing hookey for the [...]
For a long time—ever since the subprime mortgage market fell apart in 2007—people have been warning that credit cards were going to be “the next subprime.” Well, there have been a whole lot of other next subprimes since then: non-subprime mortgage loans, investment banks, Scandinavian island nations (well, one Scandinavian island nation), etc. And yet [...]
