Of all the nations on this earth, the Netherlands is one where you’d figure public transit would prevail. The country is incredibly densely populated, you can get pretty much everywhere by train or tram or bus, and car ownership is a highly taxed hassle.
And yet, here’s what it says in an article (warning: it’s in Dutch!) in Saturday’s …
This just in from Reuters:
The global flight from risk knocked precious metals again on Friday, with gold falling below $650 an ounce for the first time in three weeks as shaky global stock markets prompted investors to reduce positions in commodities.
Investors often buy gold as a safe bet when financial markets look unstable, but
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The major league Klein-on-Klein discussion on blogging that I inadvertently instigated continues apace.
Anyway, it’s not my discussion anymore, but I’ve got two final things to say:
1) Both those Klein guys were born to blog.
2) I remember pretty clearly that, in Who Will Tell People (I can’t give an exact quote because my copy is at …
This is great! My (mostly) joking riff on the Mainstream Blogosphere caught the attention of certified Mainstream Blogger Ezra Klein. Then our own MSBer-in-the-making Joe Klein, sitting at home around midnight, “major league vodka” in hand, wrote a post about the other Klein’s post about my post.
Ezra’s point was that he had some …
My latest column is up online (it’s in the paper magazine that comes out tomorrow). Here’s how it begins:
A share of stock-or a bond, a house, a stand of timber or any other asset-is worth the following: the future income one hopes to receive from it minus a haircut for the risk that things won’t turn out as expected.
This definition
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While working on my previous post about taxes, I came across an article I wrote just after the 2004 election about President Bush and fiscal policy. On the whole it stands up reasonably well, hinting as it does that the chances of Bush really doing something in his second term about the country’s long-run budget challenges (a.k.a. Social …
In his Generation Risk blog over at CNNMoney.com, Money magazine’s Pat Regnier (a former Time writer, by the way) warns of the “Great Tax Hike” to come:
Besides the current budget deficit, future lawmakers are going have to wrestle with the mounting costs of Social Security and Medicare. And whatever “peace dividend” we may have enjoyed
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Why did the market recover its bearings today? I’m thinking it’s because so many traders were happily playing the Euromoney Champions League of Investment Banking 2007. When I got the e-mail from the London-based financial magazine this morning announcing the new game, I figured it was some sort of investment bank fantasy league, along …
I was on a panel Tuesday discussing “The Dos and Don’ts of Blogging” Tuesday at the Magazine Publishers of America’s annual digital conference. Because I am the Blogspert.
Actually, no. It was because Lev Grossman was sick and I was his last-minute replacement. Business Week‘s Heather Green, who co-authors a blog about blogging (!), was …
The sermon at my church Sunday was partly about real estate prices. (Is this a uniquely New York thing? Or do men and women of the cloth across the land regularly invoke the housing market?) The rector, a former lawyer who actually owned New York real estate back in the 1970s, said that back in those days nobody could imagine what …
So the Dow Jones Industrials fell 416 points today, which sounds like an awful lot, but really isn’t anymore. On Black Monday in 1987, a 508 point drop amounted to 23% of the Dow’s value. Today’s drop was just over 3%.
Still, there’s reason for there to be worry in the air. None other than Alan Greenspan has been warning for a few years …
A reader in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, sent me a letter (on paper! with a written in pen!) in response to my column a few weeks back about northern Virginia’s astounding, taxpayer-funded prosperity (“The Federal Job Machine“). Apparently Oshkosh Truck Corp., maker of “the world’s toughest specialty trucks and truck bodies,” is doing famously …