The headlines this morning were a catchy juxtaposition: “Retail sales drop on fall in autos.” “JPMorgan profits surge six fold.” Oh, and “Wall Street on track to award record pay.” The retail sales decline was actually a just a knock-on effect of the expiration of cash for clunkers. Retail sales excluding autos were up 0.5% [...]
I really can’t put it any better than the New York Post already has: Bernie “The Bruiser” Madoff got into a prison-yard tussle with a fellow inmate over — of all things — the stock market, eyewitnesses told The Post. And, by inmates’ accounts, the 71-year-old Ponzi schemer came out the winner.
After yesterday’s sad tale of the fall of Colonial Bancgroup founder and Auburn football dictator Bobby Lowder, now we have another sports/banking mess, this time from the Netherlands. From the NRC Handelsblad (translation, for once, theirs—I’m going to stick with only English-language links this time): The Dutch central bank took control of the consumer bank [...]
Fortune‘s Brian O’Keefe (the man who gave the Curious Capitalist its name) has an epic account of the rise and fall of Bobby Lowder and Colonial Bancgroup. Much Auburn University gossip is dished as well. Just one almost-randomly chosen example: For years, Lowder’s most vocal opponent on the board of trustees was a lawyer named [...]
In case you haven’t seen it already, our colleague Stephen Gandel has an excellent cover story on the problems with the 401(k). And here he is talking it up on CNBC this morning:
In a new peak of econogeekiness for me, I actually watched the webcast of the announcement of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (a.k.a. the economics Nobel, or the fake Nobel, as detractors of the field put it). So I heard it announced in Swedish that Elinor Ostrom of [...]
The Great Macro Debate never ends. Reader Adam Ozimek writes, quoting me being snotty about rational-expectations macroeconomics: “But has any of this contributed significantly to economic policymaking? Not that I know of, not yet. That may be the policymakers’ fault, not the economists’. But the standard policy prescription of economists in the rational expectations tradition [...]
The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize gave another push this afternoon to his administration’s proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, with a speech at the White House. The only thing I heard that was really new was that he busted the chops of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, saying one of its anti-CFPA ads—which claims [...]
So I’m in the heart of Obamanation this morning, the Greenmarket on West 97th Street in Manhattan. The woman standing next to me in line for some totally precious locally grown veggies asks what I think of Obama’s Nobel. “Seems a little premature,” I answer. She laughs, shakes her head, and we both start speculating [...]
Our pals at the American Mustache Institute have a new study out revealing that mustachioed men make more money and spend more of their income than the bearded and the cleanshaven: The research found that Mustached Americans earned 8.2 percent more on average than those with beards and 4.3 percent more than the clean-shaven. People [...]
