When my article “Why Denmark Loves Globalization” was published in Time a couple of weeks ago, I said I might post the longer draft that I had tried vainly to get published in Time‘s Europe edition. Well, here it is. And it’s definitely longer:
Last year, Danish toymaker Lego announced plans to outsource most of its manufacturing to …
My newest dead-tree effort is in the issue with Barack Obama on the cover and online here. It begins:
It’s the day after Thanksgiving at Aventura Mall, north of Miami, and David Weinberg is worrying about the economy. “People are underestimating the downturn in the housing market in Florida and are spending based on home equity,” says
…
In response to popular demand (well, one commenter asked for it), I’ve put together what I promise will be my last multi-colored Case-Shiller housing price chart for a while, this time with the price indices adjusted for inflation:
This chart gives me the opportunity to explore something that Curious Capitalist reader Richard “Creative …
Thus writeth Willem “Maverecon” Buiter of the London School of Economics and FT.com:
From the point of view of the efficient allocation of resources in the medium and long term, the relative (probably even absolute in the short run) contraction in the size of the financial sectors of the advanced industrial countries is a desirable
…
Here, as promised, is what the chart looks like for the 14 metropolitan areas for which the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices go all the way back to 1987 (that is, before the last real estate bust, which sure doesn’t look all that dramatic on the chart, except maybe in LA):
A couple of comments: First, keep in mind that this chart …
My friend Jeff Gordinier has a totally brilliant Q&A with John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) up on Conde Nast’s men.style.com. (I presume there’s a shorter version in the new Details magazine, but Peter Carlson of the Washington Post says reading that will make you stinky). Anyway, it took me a while to find a …
The new Case-Shiller house price numbers are out today, and as you’ve probably already heard, they’re ugly. But they can be made pretty, and I got so much attention from other blogs the last time Time.com graphics czar Feilding Cage and I did this chart that I figured I had to post the updated version. Here it is:
Case-Shiller has …
With all the recent talk of a looming recession, I figured I ought to check in with Stanford economist Robert Hall, chairman of the Business-Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the semi-official arbiter of when recessions start and end. I e-mailed:
When everybody starts talking recession, as is this case
…
With the news that the stock market is now officially in “correction” territory (it’s down 10% since October), I thought it might be interesting to check how bad things look if you adjust for the decline in the dollar. So I adjusted the S&P 500′s performance this year to reflect the value of the dollar in a trade-weighted basket of …
Menzie Chinn, who has been keeping an eagle eye out for signs that the rapid shrinkage of the federal deficit since 2004 might be coming to an end, finds them in the Monthly Treasury Statement for October. Tax receipts have clearly stopped growing as a share of GDP. Writes Chinn:
Seems to me a fair bet that, given current estimates for a
…
From an article in Mediaweek (via Web Weekend Toronto):
Keith Blanchard, onetime editor of Maxim who worked on the sites of Wenner Media’s Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and Men’s Journal, sees print brands struggling to be responsible and authentic at the same time. “Perez Hilton was able to come up out of nowhere because he didn’t
…
From the FT:
A Californian hedge fund has made more than 1,000 per cent return this year by betting against US subprime home loans, making it one of the world’s best-performing funds of all time.
Lahde Capital, set up in Santa Monica last year by Andrew Lahde, last week passed the 1,000 per cent mark, after fees, following the latest
…
