The New York Times offers a dubious account of how quickly federal efforts to prevent foreclosures are taking hold. I got at that a bit in a story I wrote a couple weeks ago. Though I’m not quite as quick to pass judgement. When I wrote that piece in late-April, the Feds had only just announced a way to deal with the second liens of …
I’m already getting hate mail for having suggested that Americans’ epic struggle with credit-card debt isn’t entirely the fault of big, bad credit card companies. Guess that’s not what we’re in the mood to hear.
The irony is that if you actually read my story past the headline (which I didn’t write), you’ll see that I’m giving …
Justin’s not the only one hitting the book-party circuit. Last night I went to a shindig for Kate Kelly’s new book, Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughtest Firm on Wall Street. I saw in the comments section of Justin’s post that rrsafety plans to read the “Bear Stearns books”—which I assume to be this one and …
I’ve got an article in this week’s magazine about how to spend less money. Unfortunately, the graphic that went along with it didn’t make it online. The art department folks—designer Patricia Hwang and photo editor Bill Carwin—did a great job, so now, exclusively for readers of the Curious Capitalist, here it is:
For instance, we’re dealing with an uncharacteristically high percentage of people who have been out of work for six months or more—the so-called long-term unemployed—which says something about how difficult it is for people to find new jobs. The National Employment Law Project and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment …
It seems we are now to be optimistic about the direction of the economy. Justin writes about that here.
I was meeting with some economic-development-types from El Paso and Juárez earlier today and asked if they saw signs of “green shoots.” Alan Russell, president of the TECMA Group, which helps U.S. companies set up across the border …
Lots of people are giving lots of money to help George Bush build a library. TIME’s Michael Weisskopf and Michael Duffy, down in D.C.-land, report that since leaving office, Bush has raised more than $100 million. It took Clinton two years to raise that much.
I’m bringing that up here because I was recently chatting with Dean Karlan, a …
Adam Smith, who works out of our London office, has a story up on Time.com today about the problems caused by folks no longer trusting banks. He throws some numbers at us:
According to the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index, a new quarterly measure of Americans’ confidence in financial institutions, faith in banks — on
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More and more companies are cutting worker pay. I wrote a story about that a few weeks ago for the Global Business section of our magazine. I started thinking about it again last week after hearing that EMC, which makes data storage hardware, is reducing tens of thousands of salaries by 5%. The forward march continues.
At first blush, …
Nouriel Roubini was one of the first people to start talking about this financial crisis and recession and gosh darnit if he’s not going to be one of the last. He popped by this afternoon to talk to some TIME editors and writers. While he was here, he made fun of the notion that we’re seeing “green shoots” in the economy—choosing …
Today we got a major follow-up to the Obama Administration’s housing-rescue plan. You can now catch a break on your second mortgage, too. I don’t think the story I wrote is online yet, but here’s the sneak-peak:
Like the broader “Making Home Affordable” housing plan announced on Feb. 18, the new effort involves the federal government
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Remember how during our last Wall Street dust-up (way back in 2001/2002) we made 12 investment banks pay nearly half-a-billion dollars to fund independent stock research? They were then to pass along this research to their brokers and individual customers to go with their own (ostensibly deeply conflicted) opinions of companies.
That …
