Reading this blog will not make you rich. I do not have seven foolproof steps to earning your first million before you turn 25. Nor will I join the many pretenders who claim to have extraordinary insight into what, where, or how to invest your money. All that said, I know that I can help you make money—mostly by not spending it in the …
Big book weekend
I’ve been staying away from book-related self-promotion here lately, but it’s a big weekend for The Myth of the Rational Market. The book goes on sale Tuesday, and in between checking my Amazon rankings every 20 minutes (currently at #279!) , I’ve been obsessing over the weekend coverage. There’s the Roger Lowenstein review in the WaPo, …
New story: Are stocks still good for the long run?
I have a big story in the new TIME (with Steven Johnson’s Tweet Heard Round the World on the cover) about what ever happened to stocks for the long run. A sample:
The notion goes back to 1922, when a bond brokerage in New York City hired Edgar Lawrence Smith to put together a pamphlet explaining why bonds–and certainly not stocks–were
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Angelo Mozilo was a crappy leader, that much is for sure
Reading the SEC fraud-and-insider-trading complaint (PDF) against Angelo Mozilo, I was struck by how very much the former Countrywide chairman and CEO understood about the slipping lending standards that eventually led his mortgage firm to collapse in on itself. Inside his company, he was actually quite vocal about making changes to fix …
The job loss torrent slows (we think)
The employment numbers released today were pretty encouraging. Payroll employment dropped by significantly less in May than most people expected, and while the unemployment rate is now at a scary 9.4% (and is headed higher), that’s a lagging indicator of the state of the economy. The index of weekly leading indicators compiled by the …
Hank Paulson, national hero
Evan Newmark has a column in the WSJ making the case that we should start honoring Hank Paulson as a “national hero.” Newmark lists the various improvements in credit markets since Paulson got Congress to approve his Troubled Asset Relief Program last fall, then writes:
All of this is not to suggest that TARP alone made all these good
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No Souvenirs
Using RFID, one firm makes sure that sponges don’t go home with surgical patients
Hedge fund managers just want to be loved. So they’d be willing to forgo the paychecks, right?
Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s wildly over-the-top response to Joe Nocera’s critical column in last Saturday’s NYT (Felix has an excellent summary of the back and forth) got me thinking about the strange workings of the minds of the lavishly compensated. Ackman’s tone reminded me a lot of the air of aggrievement that pervades his …
Is Angela Merkel really upset about the Fed’s actions, or are all German politicians just required to say that?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to have rocked the global financial boat with her intimation yesterday that central banks—with the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England leading the way—were overdoing it with their buy-every-asset-they-can-find approach to fighting the financial crisis. From the FT:
“What other central banks
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More people are going to buy houses. How excited should we be?
This morning’s big economic news: pending home sales are up for a third month in a row. That’s an indication that home buyers are coming off the sidelines, deciding that even if the market isn’t at a bottom it’s close enough to wade back in. (My, how my metaphors mix!) This seems to be good news, especially since the increase is 1) …
Some answers to why I still have a credit card
As you may have read, I was away for a week. Now I am back. Going through the gazillion emails that were waiting for me—but, no, really, technology makes life easier—I came across a very useful note from a reader named Zoltan. Before vacation, I mused on why, if I always pay off my credit-card balance, Citi keeps me around as a …
Michael Panzner doesn’t think the hard times are over
I recently devoted a column to Peter Schiff, whom I first discussed in a piece headlined “The Armageddon Gang” in March 2007. Another member of the gang, Michael Panzner—whose 2007 book Financial Armageddon gave the group its name—recently came out with a new book titled When Giants Fall: An Economic Roadmap for the End of the …