For a while there, it seemed the housing market had made the turn to recovery. Housing sales were up in nearly every month in 2009. But today it looks like real estate is headed back down again. The National Association of Realtors is out with its monthly housing stats and sales were down 7.2% in January [...]
It’s a snow day here in New York City, with a foot and a half of the white stuff muffling the traffic noise and frosting the trees in my uptown neighborhood. Downtown on Wall Street there’s snow too, but a slightly different story: Greece is being buried by traders. They have been betting big money [...]
This morning the Commerce Department released revised figures for fourth quarter GDP. There was good news: economic output increased at a 5.9% seasonally adjusted annualized pace, up from an earlier measure of 5.7%, showing that the economy is buzzing along even faster than we thought. Stock futures promptly dropped. Wait. What?
One of the big worries Americans have about China’s rising economic power concerns its immense holdings of U.S. government debt. The fear is that Chinese actions regarding these holdings could end up destabilizing the U.S. economy, or that they could be used as a political tool to influence American policy. If China, let’s say, got [...]
Federal Reserve governor Elizabeth Duke is due to give a really nice piece of testimony tomorrow unpacking what’s going on with small-businesses lending. Judging by the advance text up on the Fed’s web site, it will be a joyously nuanced picture. Banks are hesitant to lend, yes, and are sometimes hamstrung by their own imprudent lending of [...]
You might have read the news yesterday that Atlanta issued an arrest warrant for Jamie Dimon, the CEO of superbank JP Morgan Chase. The city wanted someone to clean up the thousands of tires that were piling up on a vacant property. Well, Obama’s favorite banker is free again to fly into Hartfield-Jackson and not [...]
The scion of a shoemaking family takes a step in a different direction with Terra Plana
I’ve gotten a bit of a reputation around the TIME office in Hong Kong of being something of a China basher. I don’t think that’s fair, since I have absolutely no doubt China will be the next great superpower. But I do have an issue with what I consider blind optimism on the part of [...]
Greetings from sometimes beautiful, but often rainy Vancouver! My name is Sean Gregory, and I’m a TIME staff writer on assignment covering the Winter Olympics. Though I’m not as curious about business and economics as the excellent gatekeepers of this blog (I’m a weirdo who tends to get stoked about the Nordic Combined event), there [...]
