My new column is online and in issue of TIME with the scary-looking banker on the cover. It’s part of a “Why Main Street Hates Wall Street” package that includes Allan Sloan’s take on “What’s Still Wrong With Wall Street” and Steve Gandel’s “Meet Ken Feinberg.” My contribution is mainly a summing up of the [...]
What can we learn from this morning’s surprisingly strong 3.5% real GDP growth report? 1) Goldman Sachs does not know all. The bank’s economists had been on eerie run of sending out prescient alerts the day before major data releases—mainly the monthly employment numbers—that described in detail how the consensus was going to be wrong [...]
So I’m supposed to go speak at Columbia Business School tonight on the topic, “Should finance professors take the blame for the financial crisis?” I just realized a little while ago that I’d better start, um, figuring out an answer. Happily, Jeremy Siegel and Martin Wolf have taken to the pages of the WSJ and [...]
… to report a strange flurry of book-promotional activities. Yes, I am still promoting that stinkin’ book and, just in case anybody’s interested, I will be (I’m putting the list below the break so you don’t have to look at it if you don’t want):
The latest Case-Shiller house price numbers are out, and they’re good: Data through August 2009, released today by Standard & Poor’s for its S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices … show that the annual rate of decline of the 10-City and 20-City Composites improved compared to last month’s reading. This marks approximately seven months of improved readings [...]
This was the scene in front of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s apartment building Sunday, as photographed by TIME’s Deirdre van Dyk (who came across it after running a race in Central Park). The protesters were mad about, among other things, a Goldman-backed company shutting down the Stella D’Oro biscuit factory in the Bronx and [...]
There are the gold bugs, with their tales of impending economic apocalypse. And then there are people like Martin Murenbeeld, chief economist for Canada-based money manager DundeeWealth. “I’m just an economist who happens to like gold,” he says. “I’m not always bullish on it.” Right now Murenbeeld is bullish on gold. He was here at [...]
Flemish folk trio Laïs, plus cellist Simon Lenski. Don’t be dissuaded by the chatting at the beginning; they do start making music after a little while. Also, I want a table like that.
My latest column is online and in the issue of TIME with California on the cover. It’s about stimulus.
From a Treasury Inspector General’s report to Congress: Through July 25, 2009, we identified more than 580 taxpayers younger than 18 years of age who claimed almost $4 million in First-Time Homebuyer Credits. The youngest taxpayers receiving the Credit were four years old. Contract law generally exempts children under the age of 18 from being [...]
