Dan Gross pointed it out Friday, and the NYT joins in today: The government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program is starting to look like a moneymaker—or at least no longer like a giant hole into which money is poured. Meanwhile, the FT reports that the Federal Reserve has made a $14 billion profit on its various [...]
In Saturday’s FT, Martin Sandbu tells the amazing tale of Farouk al-Kasim, the Iraqi geologist who has been more responsible than anyone else for Norway’s success as an oil power. [H]e and his Norwegian wife, Solfrid, had decided that their youngest son, born with cerebral palsy, could only receive the care he needed there. But [...]
I think I have now more or less recovered from the Curious Capitalist family’s 11-day cross country road trip—although I still weigh about 10 pounds more than when we left. We traveled from the San Francisco Bay area to New York, stopping along the way for visits with family and friends in Lake City, Colo.; [...]
No major backstory here. Just seemed like “Home” was an appropriate song now that I’m home again.
I live in a very prosperous neighborhood of New York City, the Upper West Side, where the main thoroughfare, Broadway, is full of vacant storefronts. Except for a few recent restaurant closings, this isn’t a product of the recession—it was just as true a couple of years ago. I mainly blame the banks, which at [...]
I just taped an interview for CNN’s Your $$$$$, which airs at 1 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. If you watch you can also see Roland Martin and Richard Quest debating the merits of pocket squares (unless CNN chooses to cut that highly informative segment). My interview was about my book, so I won’t [...]
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which insures $4.8 trillion in bank deposits, reported today that its insurance fund was down to $10.4 billion at the end of June. This news generated some worried-sounding headlines. Think about it for a moment, though: If the resources available to insure $4.8 trillion in deposits (it’s actually more than [...]
We staggered back into NYC early this morning, cross-country road-trip completed. I’ll write something soon about the important things I learned sitting in a small-to-mid-sized SUV (we had a Mercury Mariner, then traded it in at the Moline Hertz for a Hyundai Santa Fe) for up to 14 hours a day. But for now, the [...]
We’re back in the Eastern time zone (in Indiana), and I’ll be back at work in a couple of days. But here, while we’re still on the road, are a few more contributions from the photo album—most of them the work of Mrs. Curious Capitalist. First, the Kit Carson Museum in Las Animas Colorado, where [...]
With the number of people going to collect unemployment checks on the rise—despite other good economic news—one starts to wonder, Could this be our third “jobless recovery” in a row? Well, not in Canada. As this recent report (PDF) from CIBC World Markets points out, our northern neighbor isn’t having nearly the unemployment issues that [...]
