It all began to unravel with the whopper about the doctorate from the Sorbonne.
ABC reports that the TV network is reopening an investigation into former consultant Alexis Debat’s work. The impressively credentialed Debat had claimed to interview a journalist’s dream list of bold-name political stars:
Former President Bill Clinton,
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I’ve got a big article about the real estate slump online and in the new issue of Time, which inexplicably features presidential candidates’ spouses on the cover instead of, well, real estate (although I’ll admit that the scoop about Bill and Hill loving Grey’s Anatomy is bigger than anything I came up with). It begins:
The housing
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Everybody’s waiting to see if the Federal Open Market Committee decides to cut interest rates on Tuesday. But as the chart below shows, the Federal funds rate has already more or less cut itself:
I’m not entirely sure what the significance of this is. I imagine it’s a function of the guys at the open market desk at the Federal Reserve …
I drive around in a used 1998 Toyota Camry. It ain’t pretty. Last week I scraped the front right fender on our narrow garage opening. Its white exterior is plastered with bird poo. And the interior–whoa, mama. The floor is crusted with bits of pretzel, animal cookie and curled-up art projects. The back seat is sticky. Somewhere in the …
Greg Mankiw links to this paper (warning: pdf) by Washington University economics grad student Charles Courtemanche (he says on his Website that he’s on the job market), who contends:
that an additional $1 in real gasoline prices would reduce obesity in the U.S. by 15% after five years, and that 13% of the rise in obesity between 1979
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The Project for Excellence in Journalism has done an interesting, if not particularly surprising, analysis of the “news agenda” of user news sites like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us (via Romenesko). Among the findings:
The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the
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I’m lazy. You are, too. If we had our way, everything would come to us via silver platter at the snap of our fingers: groceries. Clothing. Jobs. So when a new online jobhunting service promised to do all the work while I sat here, bony ass on my grubby non-Aeron office chair, I decided I would do a favor to all you other lazy workers and …
Mrs. Curious Capitalist, talking yesterday about the paralyzing injury to Buffalo Bill Kevin Everett, wondered if someday football would retreat to the sidelines of American sports, its terrible health consequences for so many players ruling it out as a game for with appeal for regular folks. After all, boxing used to be the most popular …
This just in from the W$J:
Mohamed El-Erian, head of the company that manages Harvard University’s $35 billion endowment, is resigning from that position to return to Pacific Investment Management Co.
Mr. El-Erian will start at Pimco in January as the Newport Beach, Ca.-based firm’s first co-Chief Investment Officer and Co-Chief
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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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