I’ve got an article in this week’s magazine about how to spend less money. Unfortunately, the graphic that went along with it didn’t make it online. The art department folks—designer Patricia Hwang and photo editor Bill Carwin—did a great job, so now, exclusively for readers of the Curious Capitalist, here it is: If you click [...]
The Washington Post has a fascinating tale today of student-loan behemoth Sallie Mae throwing in the towel—and abandoning its long-time frenemies in the banking industry—by more or less endorsing the Obama administration’s plan to put student lending in the hands of government. Sallie Mae’s tweak to the administration plan involves keeping the originating and servicing [...]
Right before the stock market bottomed out on March 9, I wrote a column (headlined “Call Me Mr. Sunshine”) outlining five reasons for moderate optimism on the economy. I didn’t make any kind of market call (unlike Doug Kass), but clearly I was on to something: Everybody had gotten so pessimistic that it was almost [...]
I’ve been steamed for years because, when fortune.com became money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/, the Time Warner powers that be saw fit to delete from existence out all web-only content that had previously resided on fortune.com, including the ‘London Calling’ columns I wrote every week in 2000 and 2001. Well, I’m still steamed, but not as much as former [...]
That’s me, chomping on a bull’s head after interviewing Jim Cramer today for next week’s 10 Questions. Apart from when he’s talking about how mean Jon Stewart was, Cramer is really compelling (in a rambling, totally neurotic sort of way). He didn’t yell or say “booyah,” but he did let me push all the noise [...]
The official monthly employment numbers released this morning, while somewhat less bad than those of the past few months, didn’t offer much in the way of succor. Nonfarm payrolls dropped by 539,000, seasonally adjusted, the unemployment rate rose to 8.9%, and both would have been worse but for a hiring binge at the Census Bureau [...]
They’re out! And available for download! And what do the long-awaited stress tests from America’s banking regulators tell us? Well, first of all, that American Express, BB&T, Bank of New York Mellon, Capital One, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, MetLife, State Street and U.S. Bancorp all get to go about their business without having to [...]
The Treasury Department will finally be releasing the already endlessly leaked, contemplated and criticized stress tests in a few hours. After that we will be subjected to another confusing month or so of watching the banks deemed to be in need of more capital find ways to meet regulators’ demands. Much of this, it appears, [...]
For instance, we’re dealing with an uncharacteristically high percentage of people who have been out of work for six months or more—the so-called long-term unemployed—which says something about how difficult it is for people to find new jobs. The National Employment Law Project and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University [...]
Yesterday it was the ADP employment estimate and the Challenger layoff numbers. Today, weekly unemployment claims. I’ll take it from Ian Sheperdson of High Frequency Economics, who had been extremely suspicious of earlier signs of a turn in the data: Jobless claims fell 34K to 601K, well below the consensus 635K and the lowest reading [...]
