The weekly unemployment-insurance claims numbers are out, and the number of new claims—a seasonally adjusted 521,000—was the lowest since January. (Claims peaked in late March, at 674,000.) The four-week moving average, at 539,750, continues to trend downward as well. Good news. But man, what a slow trend! It’s like watching paint …
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced today that the government’s Making Home Affordable mortgage modification program has lowered monthly payments for 500,000 homeowners, beating a Nov. 1 deadline the administration set earlier in the year. I wish Barbara were here to tell us what this means (she’s off this week). The overall goal …
Okay, this is gonna get wonky. Giuseppe Paleologo writes, in a comment to my post on Krugman vs. Chicago,
It is not true that:
“The central empirical prediction of the efficient market hypothesis, as laid out by Eugene Fama at the 1969 annual meeting of the American Finance Association, was that markets would move over time in
…
Our pals at the American Mustache Institute have a new study out revealing that mustachioed men make more money and spend more of their income than the bearded and the cleanshaven:
The research found that Mustached Americans earned 8.2 percent more on average than those with beards and 4.3 percent more than the clean-shaven. People of
…
So I’m in the heart of Obamanation this morning, the Greenmarket on West 97th Street in Manhattan. The woman standing next to me in line for some totally precious locally grown veggies asks what I think of Obama’s Nobel. “Seems a little premature,” I answer. She laughs, shakes her head, and we both start speculating on what could have …
The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize gave another push this afternoon to his administration’s proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, with a speech at the White House. The only thing I heard that was really new was that he busted the chops of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, saying one of its anti-CFPA ads—which claims that the …
The Great Macro Debate never ends. Reader Adam Ozimek writes, quoting me being snotty about rational-expectations macroeconomics:
“But has any of this contributed significantly to economic policymaking? Not that I know of, not yet. That may be the policymakers’ fault, not the economists’. But the standard policy prescription of
…
In a new peak of econogeekiness for me, I actually watched the webcast of the announcement of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (a.k.a. the economics Nobel, or the fake Nobel, as detractors of the field put it). So I heard it announced in Swedish that Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University and Oliver …
In case you haven’t seen it already, our colleague Stephen Gandel has an excellent cover story on the problems with the 401(k). And here he is talking it up on CNBC this morning:
[vodpod id=Groupvideo.3630219&w=425&h=350&fv=]
Fortune‘s Brian O’Keefe (the man who gave the Curious Capitalist its name) has an epic account of the rise and fall of Bobby Lowder and Colonial Bancgroup. Much Auburn University gossip is dished as well. Just one almost-randomly chosen example:
For years, Lowder’s most vocal opponent on the board of trustees was a lawyer named John
…
After yesterday’s sad tale of the fall of Colonial Bancgroup founder and Auburn football dictator Bobby Lowder, now we have another sports/banking mess, this time from the Netherlands. From the NRC Handelsblad (translation, for once, theirs—I’m going to stick with only English-language links this time):
The Dutch central bank took
…
The headlines this morning were a catchy juxtaposition: “Retail sales drop on fall in autos.” “JPMorgan profits surge six fold.” Oh, and “Wall Street on track to award record pay.”
The retail sales decline was actually a just a knock-on effect of the expiration of cash for clunkers. Retail sales excluding autos were up 0.5% on the …