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 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 understand [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
I haven’t done this in a few months:
It’s been too long since I posted a music video. No Belgians this time, just some Minneapolis boys singing a Minneapolis song:
