So much for that two-to-three-month improvement trend in the employment data—the decline in payroll employment reaccelerated in June: 467,000 jobs lost according to the employment situation report released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than just about any forecaster expected—and markedly worse than the 322,000 …
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The line about the babies in high heels is a reference to this segment. Beyond that it’s pretty self-explanatory.
I’m the guest tonight. Seriously. I’m filling in for poor Henry Waxman, who had to go to the hospital (he’s feeling better now, though).
Update: It’s all on tape now, and I think it went well. Stewart asks more intelligent questions than pretty much anybody on TV. And now for the information you’ve all been waiting for. The contents of …
Peer-to-peer lending is the would-be Web 2.0 replacement for our naughty banking system. In recent months I’ve had visits from both Prosper CEO Chris Larsen and Kiva CEO Premal Shah. Larsen waxed eloquent about how Prosper’s peer-to-peer approach amounted to a better, more transparent alternative to loan securitization. Shah talked about …
The John Carney-Barry Ritholtz debate on whether the Community Reinvestment Act caused the financial crisis has a strangely retro feel to it. It’s just so … 2008. It started with Clusterstock’s Carney explaining, in a long, thoughtful post, why he had changed his mind about the 1977 law meant to bring more bank lending to poor and …
Bernard Madoff got his sentence this morning. It’s 150 years in prison, which is a bit longer than your average 71-year-old can be expected to live. (Curious Capitalist Jr. was actually wondering about this yesterday—what if, he asked, Madoff got sentenced to 150 years but doctors discovered new life-extending techniques in coming …
Bloomberg’s Yalman Onaran has a long look at the role Paul Volcker is playing in the Obama Administration (via Ritholtz). It’s apparently bigger than it was a few months ago:
After the inauguration and Geithner’s confirmation, Volcker was elbowed aside, White House insiders say. His economic recovery board took weeks to get off the
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Here’s a piece I wrote for TIME.com about the Fed’s indecisive monetary policy decision yesterday. Here’s a post I wrote for the TPM Cafe Book Club discussion of Edmund Andrews’s Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. And finally, here’s some thrilling CNBC action from this morning:
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The OECD published its charmingly mistitled once-every-few-years report Pensions at a Glance on Tuesday. It’s 280 pages long, and there appears to be lots of stuff in it about the troubles the financial/economics crisis poses for pension funding. But I always go straight for the charts that compare pension systems across countries.
The …
The prez said today that the Federal Reserve’s response to the financial crisis has been A-OK:
Obama, speaking at a midday press conference, defended the performance of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke after the financial crisis.
Bernanke has done a “fine job” and “performed well,” the president said.
I don’t think Obama’s praise is entirely …
Australian executive Rob Ferguson sends me a link to an appreciation he’s written of Peter Bernstein. Which reminds me that I don’t think I ever linked here to the brief obit I wrote for TIME. The story Ferguson tells is classic Bernstein—an executive at Bankers Trust (head of its Australian operation), Ferguson had called Bernstein …
