The National Association of Realtors issued another upbeat forecast this morning, prompting Barry Ritholtz to assemble, with help from InvesTech, a nice list of similar (and wrong) pronouncements going back to 2005. Which led me to daydream:
WASHINGTON, January 08, 2009 – Over the next few months, existing-home sales are expected to
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In 2006, TIME’s new editor, Rick Stengel, called me into his office. “What do you want to do here?” he asked.
“I want to keep writing,” I said. Financial considerations may someday force me into an editing job, I told him, but for now I want to manage like I want scabies.
“What do you want to write about?” he asked.
“The workplace,” I …
I’ve been in the office a lot in 2008—yes, the whole week of it—because I’m closing a couple stories. It’s kind of nice to be back, actually. Don’t get me wrong; I’m still a rabid advocate of results-oriented, flexible work. I still think a mobile workforce is the way of the near future.
But I also know for certain that by being …
Making a mockery of the claim by several commenters on my post about the newspaper business a while back that Google produces no journalism, the company’s senior copyright counsel, William Patry, has written a wonderful exhaustively review of what exactly the Recording Industry Association of America has said through the years about …
What the @$##$%^. So I get a poke from my buddy in PR, Daniel Kile, that my blog gots me a mention in the Financial Times. The FT! Now, blogger friends, believe me when I say WiP cherishes every nod from the likes of RiceDaddies and LaDawn and Poop and Boogies. But the FT! The Wall Street Journal of Europe! The business bible of world …
Brad DeLong asks a crucial Fair Tax question:
[I]t’s a mammoth tax cut for the crowd making more than $200,000 a year and a substantial tax increase for those making between $30,000 and $200,000 a year. Does this make economic sense? It is hard to see how: What makes the $200,000-plus crowd especially deserving of a tax cut?
Arnold …
In answer to some questions about what Danish income tax rates actually are, Jacob Braestrup of the Confederation of Danish Industries offers this explanation:
The Danish top income tax bracket of 15 percent is what takes the top marginal tax to a total of 63 percent (from 49 percent – I know the difference is only 14 percentage points,
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Mike Huckabee’s victory in Iowa Thursday was a big victory also for the “Fair Tax,” the radical revamping of the federal tax code that he endorses. And while Huckabee’s Iowa win may be a one-off, one gets the feeling that the Fair Tax campaign will be with us for a while. The resurgent John McCain is mildly supportive of it as well. And …
I have a new column in the issue of Time with Benazir Bhutto on the cover and online here. It begins:
They’re turning 62 this month, the first of the baby boomers are. Adorable, aren’t they, as they hum along to the Beach Boys on their iPods and dream of Davy Crockett coonskin caps? In February the 100,000 or so of these January 1946
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Our morning meetings are dominated by politics. Today’s led off with a rousing post-mortem of the surprising results in Iowa last night. We talked about Time.com‘s speedy and smart coverage, Joe Klein’s take on Obama’s victory, and Joel Stein’s video analysis of one voting center at an Iowa elementary school (it has to do with cookies …
Marc Fisher’s article in the Sunday Washington Post about the latest development in the Recording Industry Association of America’s campaign to sue every last person in America has taken on an interesting life of its own. Wrote Fisher:
Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court
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Here, from an e-mail I just got from the folks at Russell Investments, are the world’s 10 top-performing stocks of 2007:
Inner Mongolia Yitai Coal Co. Ltd., China, 1017%
Jai Corp. Ltd., India, 877%
Reliance Natural Resources Ltd., India, 823%
Ispat Industries Ltd., India, 742%
Jindal Steel & Power Ltd., India, 664%
Essar Oil Ltd., …
