Curious CapitalistEurope
If there were an official anthem for the European debt crisis, it would be Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” and not just because the pop star croons a few lines in French and chants the name of a continental European capital. The …
Curious CapitalistRetail
Walmart became the world’s largest retailer by offering “everyday low prices” around the globe. Apparently, though, Walmart was offering something else too. The company has been plunged into a major scandal since a New York Times investigation revealed that Walmart’s Mexico subsidiary paid $24 million in bribes to local officials to …
Curious CapitalistWall Street & Markets
President Obama has taken a lot of heat from Republicans in recent weeks over high gas prices, and what he coulda, shoulda done to keep them lower. The debate reached a fever pitch during the rejection of the Keystone pipeline, …
Curious CapitalistEurope
A breakup in the euro zone just got more real with the announcement of the short list for the Wolfson Economics Prize, a prestigious economics award that has the biggest payout (£250,000, or about $400,000) after the Nobel …
Curious CapitalistEconomy
We’ve just begun coming to grips with the wimpy recovery. Are we actually in for another recession? That was the implication of a couple of economic reports I read this week, including one by ITG Investment Research, which …
Curious CapitalistJobs
National competitiveness is the topic of the moment, but so much of the debate about it is conducted at 35,000 feet, at the policy level. In late March, I visited a place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where change is happening on the ground.
Down the street from public-housing blocks is a new open-admission public school called P-Tech, …
Curious CapitalistAsia
The fall of Bo Xilai, the former head of the Chinese Communist Party in the sprawling mid-Western city of Chongqing, is the stuff of movies. A member of the party elite and supposed corruption fighter who was seen to have …
Curious CapitalistEconomy
I was struck this morning by two Op-Ed pieces: first, Larry Summers prescription for how to nurture the recovery in the FT, and Steven Rattner’s parsing of some new data on American inequality which found – surprise! – the …
Curious CapitalistJobs
The U.S. unemployment rate has fallen from 9% to about 8% in the last year, to the delight of everyone from job seekers to the Obama re-election team. But traditional economic theory tells us that shouldn’t have happened unless the economy was growing by double its current 2.5% rate.
Curious CapitalistWorld Finance
Everyone is focused on the U.S. presidential elections this year, but there’s another presidential race that’s heating up – the race to be president of the World Bank. It’s a process that’s just as political, but much …
Curious CapitalistEconomy
Last Friday’s jobs numbers came in strong, particularly in important areas like manufacturing, on which President Obama is staking much of the economic component of his re-election campaign. If voters start to feel more prosperous than they have over the last few years, it will certainly help him at the polls in November. But in order …
Curious CapitalistEconomy
Consumer confidence is up, and the new jobs numbers — the U.S. added 227,000 jobs in February, the third straight month of 200,000-plus gains — show that the U.S. economy continues to improve. Does that mean we are going to finally start seeing a shift out of the era of fearful, volatile markets that we’ve been in for over three …
