The headline from this morning’s Labor Department jobs report isn’t cheery: the number of people on payroll fell by 131,000 in July. That’s not the direction we need to be going. The payroll number for June was also revised downward, from 125,000 jobs lost to 221,000. It’s important, though, to look at the difference between what’s going [...]
If you ask Americans today which they would like most, a promising stock or an ample bond yield, my guess is that the bond would win by a landslide. Even though inflation is not eating away at purchasing power, declining incomes are. What people are hoping for, hunting for, is that reliable investment that steadily [...]
Today’s Senate hearing about for-profit colleges provides something to think about for anyone who feels privatization is the Great Solution to what ails the U.S. education system. We’ve already heard the stories about how much more often students at profit-seeking schools default on their loans. Now we have an inside look at the hard sell [...]
On the beach, At the park? In the pool? Feel free to keep doing nothing because that’s exactly what the market is doing. But if you still want to sound as though you haven’t been away all summer, here are a few facts to throw around at this evening’s barbeque. First, stocks are going nowhere. [...]
There are two obvious ways to reduce the federal deficit (spend less or tax more), and then there’s the really compelling one—stop using the tax code to guide the way people make decisions. Bloomberg recently reported that the President’s debt commission is focusing “a lot” on tax expenditures—the deductions, exemptions and other tax breaks that [...]
The time is drawing near: Washington is gearing up to figure out how to deal with wards-of-the-state Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I’ve been reporting a homeownership piece for the magazine, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the U.S. system of mortgage finance, and I’ve come to a firm conclusion about what should be [...]
Here’s another data point that gold and other things that are supposed to trade up when inflation spikes are in a bubble: The prices of books about hyperinflation are themselves hyperinflated (from Fortune): Jens O. Parsson’s out of print economic treatise, Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations, is selling for [...]
