The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that labor productivity rose at a sizzling 6.4% annual rate in the nonfarm business sector in the second quarter. To put it in ever-so-slightly less jargony terms, corporate America squeezed dramatically more output per hour out of its employees.
This is partly just a cyclical thing. …
General Motors, after prematurely announcing the news back in July (before it actually had a deal with eBay), is really truly going to start selling cars via eBay on Tuesday. You can tell it’s for real this time because the press release announcing the program is available on the eBay website (pdf!) as well as the GM one. And there’s …
The TV critic is on vacation. Plus, Shark Tank is about business and stuff. So I watched the first episode of Mark Burnett’s latest reality offering Sunday night. As did Curious Capitalist Jr., who was supposed to go to bed but kept watching because he was riveted. Hmmm, a 10-year-old (who thinks economics and business are boring) …
Last week’s issue of TIME contained a brief endorsement of a Belgian hit song—singer-songwriter Milow’s acoustic cover of 50 Cent’s “Ayo Technology.” (It really is pretty good.) Which seems reason enough to restart this blog’s Low Countries Music Marathon with this Belgian hit of a few years …
I’ve had my final say in my CBS Moneywatch “blog war” with Eric Falkenstein over efficient markets. It really hasn’t been much of a war: We both agree that financial markets go nuts sometimes. He’s just a lot more distrustful of government than I am.
Oh, and some Krugman guy has written a review of my book for this Sunday’s New York …
Here they finally are. The monthly charts!
So AIG made a $1.82 billion profit in the second-quarter—its first venture out of the red since 2007. Hmmm, it’ll only take 47 more quarters like that for the company to repay the $87.6 billion in direct aid it’s gotten from the federal government.
I’m no insurance industry analyst, but a brief look at the financials the company …
Today’s monthly employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was surprisingly positive. Meaning only that it was less negative than most people expected it would be. Nonfarm employment, the number worth paying the most attention to, was down 247,000 in July—compared with 395,000 in June and an average of 645,000 during the …
I just checked out a copy of Chris Welles’s 1975 classic, The Last Days of the Club, from my favorite library. It’s the story of the unraveling in the early 1970s of the New York Stock Exchange’s virtual monopoly on stock trading. Wrote Welles of the NYSE’s member firms (“the Club”):
Through one of the most systematic and long-standing,
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When I learned last night (via a Tweet from Greg Mitchell—yeah, Twitter still worked back then), that Budd Schulberg had died, I immediately pulled down from the shelf a copy of What Makes Sammy Run?, the book that made Schulberg famous (back before On the Waterfront made him immortal). I bought it at a thrift store years ago and have …
Jenny Anderson has a very entertaining piece in today’s New York Times (that I’m kind of amazed didn’t make page 1) about business-as-usual returning at Goldman Sachs:
“We did not have a near-death experience,” said Gary D. Cohn, Goldman’s president. The government saved the financial industry as a whole, but it did not save
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Patricia Cohen has an interesting story in today’s NYT about Media Cloud, a very cool-sounding system designed by some folks at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (including my old friend Yochai Benkler) to track the flow of topics and ideas through the media. This passage bothered me a just little, though:
Using some of the
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