The new S&P/Case-Shiller house-price numbers came out today. They’re for August, so the onset of full-on financial panic in September isn’t reflected, but the news was bad enough: The pace of decline had slowed sharply in April and May and stayed low through July, but now appears to be on the rise again. That may just be a seasonal issue …
Regular readers are well aware that Barbara and I really hate assigning deep meanings to daily stock market movements, and when we are pressed into doing so by our editors we usually respond by writing about volatility.
But today’s 889-point rise in the Dow really takes the cake. There is no plausible explanation for why the market just …
The fun fact of the morning, from Merrill Lynch emerging markets dude Michael Hartnett:
You can buy the entire free float of China and India with today’s market cap of Volkswagen, and still have enough spare change to buy Turkey.
With VW’s stock price down 42% so far today as the Great Porsche Short Squeeze of 2008 unravels, that may not …
For much of the past year, Ben Bernanke has caught a lot of flack for being too soft on inflation. Journalists mocked the Fed’s apparent reliance on core inflation, which ignored the big food and energy price hikes that were of most interest to consumers. Many economists–and a couple of Federal Reserve Bank presidents–worried that the …
Three years ago, when the personal saving rate (that is, disposable personal income minus personal outlays, usually expressed as a percentage of disposable personal income) briefly dipped below zero, it was easy to find economists willing to downplay the significance. David Malpass, then of Bear Stearns, was probably the most prominent …
In a break from our regularly scheduled business and economics programming, I offer some notes I just dug up from a conversation I had with Karl Rove about four years ago (on Sept. 10, 2004, to be precise).
We were mostly talking about William McKinley (a favorite subject of his) and the urban-oriented majority McKinley forged for the …
We finally got another quarter of negative GDP–the first since a year ago. The third-quarter number (-0.3%) will be revised as more data come in over the next couple of months, though, and economist Roger Kubarych of Italo-German superbank Unicredit (whose analysis was the first to land in my e-mail inbox) actually thinks it may go …
With the GDP numbers out today we now have all the inputs needed to figure out who’s going to win the presidential election. At least, we have all the inputs needed to run the Fair Model, Yale economist Ray Fair’s GDP- and inflation-based formula for predicting whether the incumbent party holds onto the White House or not. Plug in real …
Okay, so I totally missed this. Here’s Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, talking to the New York Post’s Keith Kelly a little over a week ago:
Moore pointed to the recent Time cover story, “How Wall Street Sold Out America,” which was written by Fortune magazine’s top editor, Andy Serwer, and noted economic and Fortune columnist Allan Sloan.
That
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My new column is up online and in the magazine with McCain and Obama on the cover, together for perhaps one last time. It begins:
In 2002 the inimitably audacious editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal brought to the nation’s attention the existence of a vast and allegedly pernicious class of “lucky duckies” who pay no federal
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Andrew Samwick (inspired by today’s Krugman column) says he told us so:
What we should have done back in January is to start planning for a future in which the consumers, finally, would sensibly retreat (not capitulate) from their debt-laced consumption rampage. Some people [Samwick, that is] were suggesting the following in
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General Motors would like some taxpayer cash—a bit more than $10 billion should do—to help it buy Chrysler. As a company spokesman told TIME: “We believe the Federal government should consider all of the tools available to it—some recently enacted—to support industries that are in distress and that are essential to the U.S. …
