The Curious Capitalist is getting curiouser. As Justin takes his leave, we’re adding three new voices to the Curious Capitalist. They belong to these people: Let me introduce, from left to right, John Curran, Bill Saporito and Steve Gandel.
The day is quickly drawing near for Justin to move on to bigger and better things things. As you can see, I am putting on a brave face, but I’m really quite upset. (Justin, as you can see, has taken to drinking.) Justin will post more about his transition later today, and I’ll post again about [...]
My column this week is about economic data, and the ways in which it can mislead (or at least send us into unnecessary tizzies). It was inspired by a stint of economic-indicator-watching during Christmas week. A GDP report came out that revised third quarter economic growth down to a 2.2% annual pace—from the 3.8% originally [...]
After a year of seemingly shouting in the wilderness, Paul Volcker finally got his druthers this morning. The Obama administration is going to push for a breakup of modern Wall Street. Or at least a bunch of restrictions to wall off risky, profitable stuff from the nuts and bolts that keep the financial system going. [...]
I’m not just finding junk as I clean out my timemagazine.com inbox. I also come across interesting stuff, like this long-ago e-mail from reader Darrell Balmer: In Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller highlighted the increased probability of high equity returns over a ten year period when the price to average preceding 10 year earnings is low. [...]
I’m cleaning out my timemagazine.com e-mail inbox one last time. One thing that this exercise is driving home to me is that, after more than 13 years at effectively the same e-mail address (e-mails addressed to my old fortunemail.com address still land in my inbox), a journalist gets an insane amount of PR spam. And [...]
The Federal Housing Administration, which has been propping up the residential real estate market in a major way, announced this morning that it would tighten its lending standards. The FHA has been doing a lot to clean up its books—which do need cleaning up. Raising down payment standards, though, isn’t expected to have much of an [...]
In honor of the NYT’s big announcement today, today’s repurposed post (from January 2007) is about newspapers: In his paean to Webcomic Achewood the other day, my fellow time.com blogger Lev Grossman mentioned in passing that “I always loved comic strips—that was the sole reason my family ever bought the Boston Globe growing up.” That [...]
It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both. That’s how Conan O’Brien put it in his immortal ‘People of Earth’ missive. You’ve got [...]
Okay, so it’s only Election Day in Massachusetts. But I’d been thinking that, since this is my last week of blogging at the Curious Capitalist, I ought to repurpose some of my favorite old posts. So here’s one from the heat of the 2008 election campaign. It begins: I just can’t wrest myself away from [...]
