In the postwar era, the consensus among both Republican and Democratic administrations has been that, except during recessions, the federal government ought to aim to run a surplus, Brad DeLong writes in a new column for Project Syndicate (via Mark Thoma). (Things didn’t work out so well in the Reagan years, but few Reagan advisers …

My friend Marc Gunther, a writer for Fortune and author of the book Faith and Fortune: How Compassionate Capitalism is Transforming American Business took a look at my Q&A with John Mackey of Whole Foods and Kip Tindell of the Container Store and had this to say in an e-mail:

To me the most interesting thing is the question that you and

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A story I wrote about how gentrification does not drive low-income minorities from their neighborhoods went up on Time.com over the weekend. It starts:

People tend to think gentrification goes like this: rich, educated white people move into a low-income minority neighborhood and drive out its original residents, who can no longer

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One of the more interesting developments in the U.S. economy over the past few decades has been the dramatic rise in incomes at the very top of the scale. There’s all sorts of anecdotal evidence for this, from spectacular paydays of hedge fund managers to the sharp rise in entrance requirements for the Forbes 400 to the prices of Fifth …

I just had a delightful conversation with Gus Sauter, chief investment officer of Vanguard. You might expect the man who used to run the much-beloved investment shop’s index funds to be dull as dirt, but quite the contrary. Did you know that he started a gold mine back in the early 80s?

As the market has gone a-plunging the past few …

My new column is online and in the edition of Time with the flag pin on the cover. It begins:

Long, long ago–in what they are pretty sure was the 1974-75 school year–John Mackey and Kip Tindell shared a house with three other students near the University of Texas campus in Austin. They played a lot of poker–Tindell always won–but

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My column in this week’s Time is about John Mackey, the CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods Market, and Kip Tindell, the CEO and co-founder of the Container Store, and their shared belief that corporations perform a lot better over time if their executives focus more on employees and customers than on shareholders.

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Another day, another smackdown from a disciple of the curmudgeonly Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. Here’s the word from Gary North:

In the May 15 issue of Time Magazine, there is an article by Justin Fox. I had never heard of Mr. Fox. His biography on Time’s site says he has a B.A. in international relations. He therefore writes for

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Investment-banker-turned-financial-chronicler Charles Morris writes (via Dealbreaker), apropos of Lehman Brothers’ troubles:

De-leveraging is a necessary prerequisite to a real recovery. The brunt of federal policy to date, however, has seemed directed at keeping the squirrel cage running at high speed -– trying to help consumers carry

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A reader (who used to work for the Wall Street Journal) suggests that I write a piece on:

How the FT has eclipsed the Journal as the definitive paper on financial markets, globalization, etc. While the Journal still gets the occasional scoops – yesterday’s SEC piece on Chris Cox was quite good – I find that for day-to-day coverage

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My friend Vanessa Friedman, who has the incongruous title of fashion editor of the Financial Times, has a new video up on the FT site. It’s kind of long, and weirdly serious in tone, but the story Vanessa tells is fascinating: Japanese consumers, who have kept the global luxury-brand business going for the past 20-odd years, have begun …

Almost every recounting of the Great Santa Barbara Oil Spill of 1969 mentions that it was on (or under) Union Oil’s Platform A that the blowout occurred. But hardly anyone ever mentions that, a few weeks after the leak was fixed, Platform A was put into service for the first time, and has been pumping oil ever since.

The folks at the …