Back in 2008, when Barack Obama was running for President, he took a politically unpopular stand on the gas tax. Both John McCain and Hillary Clinton were calling for a gas-tax “holiday” to stimulate the economy. Obama took the side of most economists (not to mention our very own Justin Fox) in saying that a [...]
UPDATE: My colleague Austin Ramzy has written a story on this topic. You can read it here. This morning the New York Times is the latest to ring in with an article about rising wages in China: The salaries of factory workers in China are still low compared to those in the United States and [...]
Where’s Goldman’s Waldo? The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was out last night with its list of demands from Goldman. And while I certainly think Goldman was wrong, morally, if not legally, when it purposely created worthless bonds so that hedgie John Paulson and indeed its own trading desk could benefit (Goldman denies this), I do [...]
With anxiety mounting about Europe’s debt crisis, China’s growth, and renewed talk of a double dip recession in the U.S., the stock market is losing steam. As the Dow dips below 10,000, buyers are not charging in to scoop up values, leading many to ask whether market’s weakness reflects mere worry or is the accurate refection [...]
Commenters here had a number of things to say in response to Chicago economist Raghu Rajan’s thoughts about the (ongoing) causes of financial and economic strain in the global economy. So folks might also be interested to know that Rajan himself is now blogging. You can read his blog here, presumably for at least as long [...]
Rising home foreclosures was of course the main catalyst of the financial crisis. But credit card debt was also a big problem for the banks as more people lost their jobs and were unable to pay back all the boats and xboxes they had rung up on plastic. So the news a month or so [...]
The U.S. gained 431,000 jobs in May, according to this morning’s release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That sounds great—until you take into account that 411,000 of those positions were for temporary Census workers. The private sector added only 41,000 jobs, which is a drop in the bucket. The employment rate edged down to [...]
Oops. I forgot to link to this Q&A with University of Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan on Time.com when it went up. Here is it now. Rajan made a big splash at Jackson Hole back in 2005 when he stood up in front of a room full of prominent economic policy makers and gave a speech [...]
It’s a long held mantra on Wall Street to buy straw hats in winter. The notion is that you should buy the shares of a company when no body wants them, or when things look their worst. Buy at the low. So based on that logic here’s the question: Is BP’s stock a buy? That’s [...]
