Philip Coggan, a.k.a. The Economist‘s Buttonwood columnist, steers me to a strange piece in the Financial Times today which attacks (without naming) Justin Fox’s book The Myth of the Rational Market. The column is basically a rehash of a blog post by Gene Fama, which I addressed here a couple of weeks ago. And it [...]
My new column is online and in the issue of TIME with the crying baby on the cover. While we’re on the topic of the cover, I should mention that Andy Serwer’s cover story on The Decade From Hell is not purely an exercise in looking through the rearview mirror. Well, actually, it is mostly [...]
This is the story, via Chris Matyszczyk, of how Ikea used Facebook to promote a new store in Malmö, Sweden:
It’s this year’s gingerbread “house,” built in the days after Thanksgiving by Curious Capitalist Jr., his maternal grandparents and his mother (I had nothing to do with it). Another view:
So I was too busy smashing potatoes (with shallots, butter and cream), falling asleep in front of the TV with the Giants-Broncos game on, and other such important matters Thursday to pay attention to the global market freakout occasioned by Dubai World’s announcement that it was going to stop paying its debt bills for six [...]
Aaron Brown organized an event at Bloomberg HQ tonight to celebrate the reissue of the late Fischer Black’s books Business Cycles and Equilibrium and Exploring General Equilibrium. Haven’t read ‘em, so I told some Fischer Black stories from my book. And I got this swell T-shirt. If I weren’t so tired I’d tell more (maybe [...]
Barbara can have her upbeat housing statistics. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis delivered a downer today, revising its estimate of third-quarter GDP growth from 3.5% to 2.8%. The revision was primarily due, the BEA said, to an upward revision to imports and downward revisions to personal consumption expenditures and to nonresidential fixed investment [...]
This morning’s happy housing news: homes are now worth what they were in the fall of 2003! Okay, so maybe that’s not the cheeriest way to frame the most-recent S&P/Case-Shiller data, though it does, I think, preserve an important piece of context. If you want to have a glass-half-full sort of day, then a better [...]
The pace of existing-home sales was 10.1% higher in October than it was in September, according to figures out today from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). That jump puts sales back where they were in February 2007 and is sure to bring renewed optimism about the state of the housing market. In September we [...]
