It’s last year’s Christmas song from the Killers!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW8oEWfuEIg]
I think this is my favorite of the Killers’ annual seasonal tunes (of which there are now four). “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” is pretty brilliant, and this year’s “¡Happy Birthday, Guadalupe!” is growing on me. But they don’t have Elton …
So I was out for the past couple of days and missed the big news about Ben Bernanke being named TIME’s Person of the Year. Then again, I had already used my keen deductive abilities to figure out that Bernanke was going to be named TIME’s Person of the Year. I’d known for a while that my colleague Michael Grunwald was working on a …
I’ve got a column online and in the issue of TIME with the Year in Pictures on the cover. It’s about measuring unemployment. In it I cite a Bureau of Labor Statistics study that found that what people said about their interest in getting a job wasn’t all that predictive of whether they’d actually get one down the road. It’s here if you …
The great MIT economist Paul Samuelson died today, at age 94. The NYT, in its obituary, calls him “the foremost academic economist of the 20th century,” which sounds about right. Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis, a reworking of his doctoral dissertation that was first published in 1947, transformed graduate education in …
I’m not going to show the video of the new Orrin Hatch Hanukkah song, because that’s just overexposed. Same goes for Adam Sandler, of course. Neil Diamond’s cover of Adam Sandler less so, but I just dunno. Sarah Silverman’s “Give the Jew Girl Toys” is inappropriate for a family blog. My favorite Hanukkah song is the Barenaked Ladies’ …
The House of Representatives just voted 223-202 to approve the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009. The Senate still has to approve its own financial reform plan, and once that happens (if it happens), there will be all sorts wrangling and compromising and sneaky inserting of provisions that hardly anybody will …
I wouldn’t put toooo much stock in such forecasts at this early stage (and GDP growth matters a lot less to most of us than, say, whether we’ve got jobs). But in the wake of several surprisingly positive data releases this week, some Wall Street economists are revising their forecasts of fourth-quarter growth upwards. A few examples from …
Goldman Sachs, in response to the continuing bad press it’s been getting for planning to shower its employees with money, announced today that bonuses for its top 30 managers will be paid out entirely in stock.
Yawn. Bonuses for top management at Goldman were already paid out mostly in stock. Goldman already used clawbacks to make sure …
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (previously known as the Basle Committee or the Bâle Committee, which always made me think it had something to do with Ba’al) has been meeting this week and plotting to transform the world of banking regulation. The two big changes that the UN Security Council of banking regulators has in …
I’m sure somebody will eventually be able to convince me that this is a bad idea, but my initial reaction to UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling’s temporary 50% bank bonus tax is why the heck not? No, it won’t raise a huge amount of money (an estimated £550 million, which is about $900 million at today’s exchange rate). Yes, …
Fortune’s Colin Barr has an interesting story (it’s almost a week old but I just discovered it via Jim Kim) about why Wells Fargo still hasn’t paid back the $25 billion it borrowed (under duress) from us taxpayers last year, even as Bank of America has and Citigroup hopes to. His main explanation is that, unlike BofA and Citi, Wells …
Here’s a pretty depressing picture, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
This means that, as of November, 19.4% of American men in their prime working years didn’t have jobs. By this measure, the current job situation (for men, at least) is much, much worse than in any downturn since the BLS started measuring this stuff in …
