I’ve been steamed for years because, when fortune.com became money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/, the Time Warner powers that be saw fit to delete from existence out all web-only content that had previously resided on fortune.com, including the ‘London Calling’ columns I wrote every week in 2000 and 2001. Well, I’m still steamed, but not as …
That’s me, chomping on a bull’s head after interviewing Jim Cramer today for next week’s 10 Questions. Apart from when he’s talking about how mean Jon Stewart was, Cramer is really compelling (in a rambling, totally neurotic sort of way). He didn’t yell or say “booyah,” but he did let me push all the noise buttons to the left of his …
The official monthly employment numbers released this morning, while somewhat less bad than those of the past few months, didn’t offer much in the way of succor. Nonfarm payrolls dropped by 539,000, seasonally adjusted, the unemployment rate rose to 8.9%, and both would have been worse but for a hiring binge at the Census Bureau …
They’re out! And available for download! And what do the long-awaited stress tests from America’s banking regulators tell us? Well, first of all, that American Express, BB&T, Bank of New York Mellon, Capital One, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, MetLife, State Street and U.S. Bancorp all get to go about their business without having to …
The Treasury Department will finally be releasing the already endlessly leaked, contemplated and criticized stress tests in a few hours. After that we will be subjected to another confusing month or so of watching the banks deemed to be in need of more capital find ways to meet regulators’ demands. Much of this, it appears, will involve …
Yesterday it was the ADP employment estimate and the Challenger layoff numbers. Today, weekly unemployment claims. I’ll take it from Ian Sheperdson of High Frequency Economics, who had been extremely suspicious of earlier signs of a turn in the data:
Jobless claims fell 34K to 601K, well below the consensus 635K and the lowest reading
…
Bloomberg is now reporting that Wells Fargo will need $15 billion in new capital as a result of its stress test. This is a lot less than Bank of America’s $34 billion (or so), but it’s still something of a comedown for a bank that has been making the argument that it
I ran into Paul Krugman on the street yesterday afternoon. I asked him if he was going to the TIME 100 dinner that night (he’s on the list). He sort of sighed and said yeah—adding that he’d agreed to speak for two minutes and was having trouble coming up with something “uplifting” to say. I chortled and said we hadn’t put him on the …
Two intriguing job market data points this morning:
1) “Automatic Data Processing, a payroll-processing firm, said private-sector employment decreased by 491,000 in April, a 31% improvement from the revised 708,000 drop in March. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had expected a loss of 643,000 jobs last month.”
2) “Separately, …
Barry Ritholtz asks the big question for stock market investors:
In terms of historical analogies, investors should be asking themselves: Is this move more like 1982 or 1974?
It’s gotta be 1974. Late that year, the stock market began to bounce back from the collapse of 1973-1974. It topped out in late 1976, then spent the next six years …
Mark Clothier and John Helyar have written a fine Bloomberg article about tough times in Ridgewood, NJ, that doesn’t seem to be available anywhere on the Bloomberg site but is reprinted at length in the Newark Star-Ledger (thanks to Jim Kim of Fierce Finance for the initial tip, although I ended up having to find the article myself). …
My initial reaction to last week’s news that Conde Nast Portfolio was closing down was so selfish that it kept me from blogging on the subject: Roger Lowenstein was gonna review my book in the June issue. And now there won’t be a June issue. What a travesty!
Well, now I’ve read John Koblin’s epic telling of the Portfolio saga in the New …
