If you’re a hotshot angling for an exec job at a big New York City company, chances are Ken Springer is on your tail. He’s the president of an innocuous-sounding outfit called Corporate Resolutions, and it’s his business to dig out your dirty laundry, give it a good sniff–then tell your prospective boss all about it.
Springer visited …
Merrill Lynch’s Richard Bernstein is one of the few investment strategists on Wall Street whose writings are worth paying close attention to. Back in January, for example, he wrote this about how financial markets would eventually be shaken from their complacency:
We view financial risk much like popcorn popping in a microwave. Until the
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Felix Salmon really hates entertainer/economist/half-informed-pontificator Ben Stein’s column in the Sunday New York Times business section (actually, I suspect that there’s a love/hate thing going on there, but whatever). This Sunday, Stein wrote:
Owning your own home is generally considered the bedrock of the American dream, so this is
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Harvard economist Martin Feldstein is calling it quits after 30 years of running the National Bureau of Economic Research. I think this is a really big deal: Feldstein took over a mostly moribund NBER in 1977 and established it as possibly the most important arbiter–certainly more important than any one academic journal–of what …
Back in July, in Countrywide Financial’s quarterly earnings conference call, CEO Angelo Mozilo uttered these memorable words:
Nobody saw this coming. S&P and Moody’s didn’t see it coming, but they simply just downgrade bonds, they don’t take hits. Bear Stearns certainly didn’t see it coming. Merrill Lynch didn’t see it coming. Nobody saw
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I know that mocking the nation’s real estate trade organizations for their perpetual sunny optimism in the face of bad news has been getting mighty fashionable lately–maybe too fashionable. But this little item from the National Association of Realtors’ house publication is just too precious to ignore:
University of Florida study
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The August drop in employment that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning surprised a lot of people. You can’t really blame them: It was the first monthly decline since 2003, the numbers had been moderately strong in recent months, and the survey was conducted in the first half of the month, missing a couple of very …
I know, I know. Sitting innocently in my child’s playroom is a pile of brightly colored, ticking time bombs. Having read Jyoti Thottam’s story in this week’s TIME, “More Trouble in Toyland,” I should be nauseous with the fear so familiar to my generation of neurotic parents:
Mattel’s recent recalls of more than 19 million
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I put together this chart for my column this week, but it was (correctly) deemed too confusing for Time readers. On the assumption that readers of this blog are a hardier breed, here it is:
The idea was to investigate whether stock market volatility had risen or fallen as professional investors (mutual funds, pension funds, etc.) took …
Are working moms a good or bad thing for society?
What kind of numb-nut question is that?
No less vaunted an organization than the Pew Research Center asked that question. Here are the results:
Pew concludes:
In the span of the past decade, full-time work outside the home has lost some of its appeal to mothers. This trend holds
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Success is working in an office with lights. (Viewer warming: it’s crude. As expected.)
My new column is up online and in the issue of Time with General Petraeus on the cover. It begins:
In 1951, Princeton economics major Jack Bogle wrote a senior thesis extolling the virtues of the small but growing mutual-fund industry. At the time the reigning view of the stock market was that expressed 1 1/2 decades earlier by the great
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