Pay through the decades

From a new CBO publication, Changes in the Distribution of Workers’ Annual Earnings Between 1979 and 2007 (pdf):

New column: Get homes off welfare

My new column is up online and in the issue of TIME with Sgt. First Class Chet Millard on the cover. It’s about the real-estate-industrial complex. And if you’re wondering whether it was inspired by—and is shamelessly derivative of—Barbara’s TIME.com piece of few days ago, the answer is yes, of course it is.

A headline-writing primer for the WSJ’s op-ed editor

A couple weeks ago, John F. Cogan, John B. Taylor and the middle-initial-challenged Volker Wieland had an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal headlined “The Stimulus Didn’t Work.” I was pretty nonplussed when I read it, but it was just now, while reading over the critiques of it by Brad DeLong/Mark Sadowski and Goldman [...]

Nope, no jobs here

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has just delivered another not-at-all encouraging employment report, with payroll employment down another 263,000 for the month of September, the unemployment rate up to 9.8%, and U-6 unemployment (which includes what the BLS calls “discouraged workers” who have given up actively looking for jobs, plus “marginally attached workers” and a [...]

My sad Saturn farewell

The Cheapskate Blog’s Brad Tuttle writes that “the first new car I could truly call my own was a bare bones Saturn SL.” My first new car was a Saturn, too. Being no cheapskate, I splurged on an SL2. It was a 1992, just the second model year. I was living in Montgomery, Alabama, not [...]

Are we in the middle of the W?

UniCredit’s Harm Bandholz offers an interesting reading of one of the piles of economic releases that came out today: The mild decline in the headline ISM and its most important subcomponents (production, new orders and employment) is so far the most clear-cut signal that the technical rebound of the US economy might have reached the [...]

False beliefs and the efficient market

A philosopher of science (Duke’s Alexander Rosenberg) does an awfully good job of explaining the core problem with the efficient market hypothesis (via Zubin Jelveh): The efficient markets thesis is that the market makes complete use of all relevant information, and the “proof” is roughly that in a perfectly competitive market among perfectly rational agents [...]

Wall Streeters like conspiracy theories. Always have

Felix Salmon, after previously describing the readers of the blog sensation Zero Hedge as loser day traders and getting called out for it by my old friend The Equity Private (now blogging at Zero Hedge as Marla Singer), reconsiders: Far from reflecting the conspiracy-minded and often-disjointed ramblings of harmful-only-to-themselves retail day-traders, could ZH actually be [...]

Ready to try high-frequency trading at home?

Okay, so now I understand high-frequency trading. Well no, no, I don’t. But I really like Samantha Bee’s costume.