If you’ve been reading the articles in your dead-tree newspapers and magazines, you know it’s a terrifying time to be the one writing them.
The L.A. Times is snipping its already decimated staff. Gannett is cutting 10% of its workforce. The Christian Science Monitor is killing its print publication. My own employer, Time Inc., is …
Three years ago, when the personal saving rate (that is, disposable personal income minus personal outlays, usually expressed as a percentage of disposable personal income) briefly dipped below zero, it was easy to find economists willing to downplay the significance. David Malpass, then of Bear Stearns, was probably the most prominent …
For much of the past year, Ben Bernanke has caught a lot of flack for being too soft on inflation. Journalists mocked the Fed’s apparent reliance on core inflation, which ignored the big food and energy price hikes that were of most interest to consumers. Many economists–and a couple of Federal Reserve Bank presidents–worried that the …
The fun fact of the morning, from Merrill Lynch emerging markets dude Michael Hartnett:
You can buy the entire free float of China and India with today’s market cap of Volkswagen, and still have enough spare change to buy Turkey.
With VW’s stock price down 42% so far today as the Great Porsche Short Squeeze of 2008 unravels, that may not …
Heard of moonlighting? Yeah. Now you get the picture.
Iconoculture says it’s the new trend (they call it “daylighting,” but I thought my term was cleverer…I’m trademarking). Iconoculture says:
Consumers who have gotten used to a certain lifestyle may take drastic measures to maintain that lifestyle, even when the economy tanks. It’s
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Regular readers are well aware that Barbara and I really hate assigning deep meanings to daily stock market movements, and when we are pressed into doing so by our editors we usually respond by writing about volatility.
But today’s 889-point rise in the Dow really takes the cake. There is no plausible explanation for why the market just …
My recently widowed Dad moves in this Friday. We’ve prepared the house: Chris has put in safety bars in the bathrooms and a bannister on the stoop. Right now he’s installing a new sink with an easy-to-use faucet. We’ve cleared out the downstairs playroom and moved in a bed, a comfy reading chair, a smoke alarm. We’re stocked up on …
The new S&P/Case-Shiller house-price numbers came out today. They’re for August, so the onset of full-on financial panic in September isn’t reflected, but the news was bad enough: The pace of decline had slowed sharply in April and May and stayed low through July, but now appears to be on the rise again. That may just be a seasonal issue …
Since I’ve become something of a volatility junky, let me point you to this interesting FT article that describes how volatility is wreaking havoc on the way financial firms value their assets. An excerpt:
The second, more tangible implication of the return of volatility relates to the models that banks and hedge funds use to measure
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I have a brief quote in my new column on the Keynes comeback from the University of Chicago’s Robert Lucas, who in 1980 declared Keynesianism not just dead but laughable (“At research seminars, people don’t take Keynesian theorizing seriously anymore; the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another.”) and later won a Nobel for …
First came the Great TIME.com Blog Crash of 2008. Then I spent Monday as the Nauseous Capitalist, and really didn’t feel up to posting. I still don’t feel great but here, finally, is a perfunctory post linking to my latest column. It begins:
We are all Keynesians now. It’s a phrase that entered public discourse as the headline of a TIME
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It was a dark and stormy day at Employer Inc.
Walking to the window, Mark gritted his teeth and scratched his face, which felt itchy and hot. He surveyed the crepuscular lights of London, as if the missing file might be hiding among them. Monday’s presentation would be his first in front of CliffBank’s senior management team. He’d
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