I’ve gotten a few messages from friends and strangers this week telling me that they think I should have been harder on Paul Krugman for not mentioning my book in his big NYT Mag essay on “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” Now don’t get me wrong—I really wish he had brought up The [...]
The Census Bureau’s annual look at income and health coverage (based on surveys conducted in March) is out today. The rise in the poverty rate and in the percentage of Americans without health insurance got the headlines. But here’s a fact that for some reason the Census Bureau didn’t emphasize: The median household income in [...]
A report from TIME’s Bobby Ghosh: Fears that China will ditch the dollar are greatly exaggerated: the U.S. currency will remain the world’s dominant financial instrument for the foreseeable future. That’s straight from one of Beijing’s top economists, Zhang Yuyan, who was among a small group of Chinese officials briefing journalists in New York today. [...]
Millions of people have lost their jobs this year. But not many CEOs. From the management-change trackers at Liberum Research: Executive turnover numbers for August 2009 have remained very slow when compared with the same numbers in August 2008. When the numbers are examined from a quarterly or half yearly perspective the totals are even [...]
Big shocker! General Motors and Chrysler probably won’t be able to pay back all those loans we’ve extended them! From the just-released September report of the Congressional Oversight Panel assigned with keeping an eye on the Troubled Asset Relief Program: Although taxpayers may recover some portion of their investment in Chrysler and GM, it is [...]
I’m a little late mentioning this, but my latest column is online and in the issue of TIME with Leno on the cover. Here’s how it starts: It was one of Dick Cheney’s more memorable lines. “Deficits don’t matter,” he told Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in 2002. Later, after O’Neill made the conversation public, Cheney [...]
Here in the U.S., stock market investors seem thrilled that the pace of job losses slowed a bit in August. Guess what happened up in Canada? Payroll employment actually increased by 27,000 jobs (0.2%) in August, driven by gains in retail and wholesale trade and in financial services. Canadian economists weren’t falling over themselves in [...]
The big headline from the August jobs report released this morning will probably be that the unemployment rate rose to 9.7% (from 9.4% in July). But as I’ve written before, the better month-to-month measure of the state of the job market is the change in nonfarm payroll employment, and that showed modest improvement—or more accurately, [...]
Paul Krugman has an epic, and really great, dissection of the state of economics in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine—headlined “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong”—that has already gone up online (thanks to Daniel Lippmann for letting me know about it). For those who only know Krugman from his NYT columns, it’s a wonderful [...]
A federal judge in New York ruled today that credit ratings aren’t necessarily First-Amendment-protected “speech.” According to the WSJ, the ruling, by U.S. District Judge Shira Sheindlin (apparently no relation to Judith “Judge Judy” Sheindlin), only applies to ratings that aren’t publicly distributed, and for the moment is binding only in cases filed in the [...]
