Patricia Cohen has an interesting story in today’s NYT about Media Cloud, a very cool-sounding system designed by some folks at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (including my old friend Yochai Benkler) to track the flow of topics and ideas through the media. This passage bothered me a just little, though: Using some [...]
From Zeit Online (clunky translation mine): In Germany the government-promoted auto boom is gradually coming to an end. Thanks to cash for clunkers (Abwrackprämie) the number of new-car sales in July was, at 340,000 vehicles, still 30% higher than the previous year’s level, reported the Federal Motor Vehicle Office (Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt) Tuesday in Flensburg. In June, [...]
One of the nicer effects of the credit crunch has been less junk mail from card companies looking to sign you up. Is that trend ending? The good folks at Synovate, a firm that tracks who mails what, made this chart. There was a long, hard fall in the number of credit card offers going [...]
Economist Dick Thaler has a new FT opinion piece that says nice things about (and quotes extensively from) The Myth of the Rational Market. (Thanks, Dick!) In it, he makes the case that the efficient market hypothesis consists of two main ideas, “No Free Lunch” and “The Price is Right,” that have met very different [...]
For my previous post on the economics of cash for clunkers, I tried to get Alan Blinder’s take—since the whole danged thing was his idea—but didn’t hear back from him on time. Now I’ve just gotten this e-mail from him: I always thought that cash for clunkers would be an effective stimulus, but it seems [...]
It all began a year ago with a suggestion from a prominent economist. Wrote Princeton University’s Alan Blinder in the July 27, 2008 New York Times: Economists and members of Congress are now on the prowl for new ways to stimulate spending in our dreary economy. Here’s my humble suggestion: “Cash for Clunkers,” the best [...]
As recently as a few weeks ago, the Treasury Department seemed pretty unhappy(PDF) with how quickly mortgage servicers were extending loan modifications to struggling borrowers under its Making Home Affordable Program. That led quite a few people–including me–to write stories like this one, ruminating on why things weren’t taking off more quickly. This morning Treasury [...]
The talk of the Twittersphere tonight is Damian Paletta and Deborah Solomon’s WSJ story about Tim Geithner cutting loose on Ben Bernanke, Sheila Bair, Mary Schapiro et. al. in an “expletive-laden critique last Friday as frustration grows over the Obama administration’s faltering plan to overhaul U.S. financial regulation.” He’s frustrated with the flak he’s been [...]
“Money is a poor man’s credit card.” -Marshall McLuhan If I wrote Long or Short Capital, that would be today’s installment of Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing. I picked it up from Charles Geisst‘s new book, Collateral Damaged: The Marketing of Consumer Debt to America. I’m still reading and will have more to say later. [...]
Floppy-haired neopuritan Kurt Andersen has commenced blogging this week for TIME.com to promote his new book Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America, which is based on his excellent TIME cover story of a few months back, “The End of Excess: Why this crisis is good for America.” He is attacking [...]
