Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco put out a research report today raising the prospect of yet another jobless recovery. Here we go again? Those of you playing along at home will remember that recessions in the 1970s and 1980s came with big spikes in unemployment—but once the economy ticked up, jobs [...]
I’ve got a new story up on Time.com about how to find a job using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. It begins: Brian Ward lost his job on a Friday afternoon. Eleven days later he had a new one. With nearly 1 in 10 people out of work and the typical job search [...]
Everyone please extend a warm welcome to Brad Tuttle, our newest Time.com blogger. Over the weekend he started blogging about how to spend less money. Topical, eh? You can follow his thrifty ways on The Cheapskate Blog. And Brad, if you’re ever down Manhattan way, let me know and I’ll take you out to lunch. [...]
I had this thank you letter in mind that I was going to write to Peter Bernstein. It wasn’t going to be electronic, and it wasn’t going to be just a brief note. The proximate cause was the blurb he wrote for the back cover of my new book, but I meant to thank him [...]
Zvi Bodie e-mails with an interesting question, related both to my article about long-run investing in the current TIME (in which he plays a starring role) and my book: If you doubt the rationality of the stock market, then isn’t investing in stocks a crap shoot? How can you be sure that there is a [...]
I’ve been staying away from book-related self-promotion here lately, but it’s a big weekend for The Myth of the Rational Market. The book goes on sale Tuesday, and in between checking my Amazon rankings every 20 minutes (currently at #279!) , I’ve been obsessing over the weekend coverage. There’s the Roger Lowenstein review in the [...]
I have a big story in the new TIME (with Steven Johnson’s Tweet Heard Round the World on the cover) about what ever happened to stocks for the long run. A sample: The notion goes back to 1922, when a bond brokerage in New York City hired Edgar Lawrence Smith to put together a pamphlet [...]
Reading the SEC fraud-and-insider-trading complaint (PDF) against Angelo Mozilo, I was struck by how very much the former Countrywide chairman and CEO understood about the slipping lending standards that eventually led his mortgage firm to collapse in on itself. Inside his company, he was actually quite vocal about making changes to fix the situation. He [...]
The employment numbers released today were pretty encouraging. Payroll employment dropped by significantly less in May than most people expected, and while the unemployment rate is now at a scary 9.4% (and is headed higher), that’s a lagging indicator of the state of the economy. The index of weekly leading indicators compiled by the Economic [...]
Evan Newmark has a column in the WSJ making the case that we should start honoring Hank Paulson as a “national hero.” Newmark lists the various improvements in credit markets since Paulson got Congress to approve his Troubled Asset Relief Program last fall, then writes: All of this is not to suggest that TARP alone [...]
