Here’s Jim Manzi (no, not that one; this one), writing in National Affairs (via Michael Pettis) on the question, addressed here a couple of days ago, of balancing economic security with economic dynamism: Conservatives have …, as a rhetorical and political strategy, downplayed the problems of cohesion — problems like inequality, wage stagnation, worker displacement, [...]
Barry Ritholtz has a good summing-up of a new paper (pdf) by three IMF economists on the link between lobbying and risk-taking by lenders. The gist: Firms that made the riskiest loans spend the most on lobbying Congress. And what were their lobbying aims? • prevent any tightening of lending laws that reduce the benefits [...]
After being urging to do so by several readers, I finally read Ron Paul’s End the Fed. I was about to buy it for the Kindle I got for Christmas, but when I got to work Monday morning there was a package in my mailbox from Gary Howard at Paul’s Campaign for Liberty with two [...]
I’m back in the office on what is shaping up to be an extremely slow news day, which is why I find myself reading things like a little Q&A with economist Raghuram Rajan on the WSJ’s Real Time Economics blog. Here’s one of the Qs the resulting A: How do you expect the U.S. model [...]
My favorite song from last year’s Colbert Christmas show is Colbert’s own “Cold, Cold Christmas.” But I can’t find a video of that. So here’s Feist:
TIME is “dark” this week—that is, we’ve got no magazine to put out and not many people in the office. But we still have a Website, so I volunteered to pay attention to this week’s economic releases and post on them when they seemed to merit attention. Well, today we’ve got personal spending up 0.5% [...]
A lot of people think the problem with our banks is that they tried to do too much. Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute argues the opposite: as banks have been forced out of lending to public companies–which in themselves offer significant diversification–they have focused more and more of their resources on fewer and [...]
The Bureau of Economic Analysis has just released its third try at estimating third-quarter GDP. It’s now been ratcheted down to 2.2%—from 2.8% in the estimate released a month ago and 3.5% in the original estimate. The culprit: downward revisions to nonresidential fixed investment, to private inventory investment, and to personal consumption expenditures. It just [...]
This just went out on Businesswire. For those who don’t believe in clicking through, it says I’ve got a new job, editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group. I start Jan. 25, and I’ll still be at TIME and writing this blog through Jan. 22. (I’m pretty sure the blogging over the next month [...]
This was the sidewalk in front of the Citibank at 96th and Broadway and New York a little after noon on Sunday. The reason I took a picture of it was because, while most of the sidewalks along Broadway were already salted and shoveled and ready for walking after the big Saturday night snowfall, the [...]
