The market is down again today and one of the reasons people have cited for the recent 800 point drop in the Dow is that investors are worried about the bank regulations coming out of the Obama administration. The first part of the argument is that Obama’s plan to tax the banks and limit what they [...]
The stock market got very jittery in advance of this morning’s unemployment report, lining up with many economists’ expectations that the jobless rate would hold steady at 10% or tick upwards. Then it didn’t. The unemployment rate, which has been hovering around 10% for the past three months, instead ticked down in January, to 9.7%. More meaningfully, broader [...]
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 268 points on Thursday as investors took full stock of the troubled world. The weaker members of the European Union are in financial crisis and talk of defaults fills the air. The fiscal problems and the stock market’s weakness don’t surprise me, but I must admit that this is [...]
Huron Valley Steel is taking automobile deconstruction to its logical conclusion: metal and energy
As we look back on the 2009 stock market we’ll likely long for more inflection points–those moments when the dark clouds let a ray of sunshine peek through and stocks take off. Some investors capitalized on this turn more than others. To see who played the back-from-the-brink rally best, take a look at the table [...]
What does this chart tell us?
Back in October, I wrote that Citi was basically a big garage sale, willing to sell any part of the bank that wasn’t nailed down (they had already gotten rid of the nailed down stuff). At the time, the PR folk denied that most of Citi was up for sale. They said the bank had [...]
While I was out of town I missed this new paper (PDF) from MIT economist David Autor, which shows that people who are out of work and take a temporary gig until a full-time position comes along might be doing damage to their long-term earnings power. Autor and Susan Houseman of the W.E. Upjohn Institute [...]
Well, I’m back from Switzerland. Europe was great, but boy was it nice to have a stupidly large coffee in a throw-away cup this morning. On the plane ride home, I wrote a Time.com piece titled “10 things I learned in Davos.” I’ll link to it as soon as I see it go up. (UPDATE: [...]
If you’re worried that the federal stimulus to the economy is not reaching people fast enough, take heart from the latest announcements by Toyota. Now that the automaker has found a fix for its sticky accelerator-pedal problem, it’s going to quickly start sending mini repair kits to its dealers around the world. The estimated time for [...]
