The bottom-line truth about today’s Federal Reserve-led coordinated effort by six of the developed worlds’ central banks to ease the liquidity problems of European financial institutions is this: It doesn’t change anything
Having $4 billion in the bank is not your typical definition of broke. That’s why American Airlines’ parent company AMR surprised a bunch of people — particularly, one presumes, the five Wall Street analysts who still rated the company’s shares a “buy” — when it filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday
The hope in the euro zone is that these two talented men can use their powers to rebuild investor confidence and prevent the debt crisis from eating further into the core of Europe
A common refrain in conversations about poverty—and unemployment and income inequality—is that more education will lead people to better-paying jobs and higher living standards. I certainly don’t want to make an argument against education, but recent research from MIT economist Frank Levy and business professor Tom Kochan provides an especially sharp illustration of why just [...]
More and more countries are getting dragged down into the euro zone debt crisis as its leadership continues to dither
It’s hardly surprising that the stresses of poverty would take a psychological toll, but new research is showing just how stark a toll it can be
Why are the markets so schizophrenic? Bond spreads are rising, signaling rich country solvency fears. Yet stocks are up (except when political ineptitude like the failure of the super committee to reach a debt deal knocks them temporarily down). The mixed signals aren’t as strange as you might think — they reflect the large and [...]
Here’s what we have learned for sure during the past three years: No one likes bailouts. Not even, apparently, the people being bailed out
In this week’s magazine story on poverty in the U.S., I briefly mention that the way we typically count the poor is far from ideal. The official U.S. poverty line dates back to the 1960s, when Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, came up with a measure based on how much money [...]
Ryan Allis talks about how he went from sleeping in his office and dumpster diving to running a $50 million online-marketing-software business
