The notion that the U.S. is stingy about government benefits in comparison with the rest of the wealthy world is widely held, and is mostly backed up by the data. But in the case of retirement benefits, it’s getting less true by the day. Yet few here in the States have caught on.
Consider what Chicago lawyer/rabblerouser Tom Geoghegan …
My latest column is in the issue of Time with Mike and Arnie on the cover and online here. It begins:
In early June, the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)–the club of the world’s wealthy and almost wealthy nations–released a 208-page document perversely titled Pensions at a Glance. Inside is a rundown of how
…
Curious Capitalist Jr. took the photo above. He and all the rest of the second graders at his school did a Circle Line field trip today. I was one of the chaperones. Nobody fell out of the boat. And nobody got lost in the subway on the way back. A spectacular success.
One of CC Jr.’s classmates took this cool shot (with my camera) of …
Blogger/law professor Stephen Bainbridge, trolling for similar sob stories after a bad United Airlines experience, has found one of the great blog posts of our age, by one Brianna, who was stranded by United in Denver twice in one weekend last month. I was going to paste a sample here, but none of the ones I came up with did the thing …
A friend asks, apropos of my post about the dollar’s future as reserve currency:
As a currency becomes weaker and less sought after by central banks doesn’t it take a toll on the issuing nation’s economic standing in other ways? Did the pound’s decline as a reserve currency coincide with the decline of England’s power and influence?
…
Early last week, UBS hosted its 13th annual Reserve Management Seminar in Thun, Switzerland. In attendance were the people whose job it is to figure out what to do with the foreign currency reserves held by their country’s central banks. They came from 78 nations, representing institutions with reserves totaling $4.8 trillion.
In other …
MasterCard released a report today ranking the 50 most important “centers of commerce” around the world. Here’s the top ten:
1. London
2. New York
3. Tokyo
4. Chicago
5. Hong Kong
6. Singapore
7. Frankfurt
8. Paris
9. Seoul
10. Los Angeles
I had breakfast this morning with Yuwa Hedrick-Wong, the Singapore-based MasterCard economic …
A while back, Karen Tumulty linked on Swampland to a Washington Post article about John Edwards’ ties to hedge fund operator Fortress Investment Group and asked me to comment on whether we should care. I said we should, although I couldn’t really tell how much, and both Karen and I got some grief from commenters for purportedly flogging …
The latest guest blogger over on Swampland, Democratic political consultant Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, has been stirring things up bigtime with his condemnation of the “Metropolitan Opera Wing” of the Democratic Party. I initially thought this was because his loyalties lay with the party’s notoriously combative Lyric Opera of Chicago Wing. …
Harvard Law professor and bankruptcy guru Elizabeth Warren has a really interesting proposal out today in the journal Democracy (I first heard about yesterday in Gretchen Morgenson’s column in the NYT):
It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible
…
A reader named Greg from Sunnyvale, Calif., writes, regarding my column about how ExxonMobil is devoting a significantly smaller share of its resources to developing new sources of oil than it did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s:
I was thinking that, as a journalist, you might want to investigate an alternative explanation for
…
As my fellow Time.com blogger Lisa Takeuchi Cullen reports, somebody from LinkedIn stopped by Time Thursday to try to convince people here to make more use of the professional networking site (or whatever you want to call it). I missed the tutorial, but I am a LinkedIn member (albeit one with a piddling 27 connections). A sample tip:
3.
…
