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.
Yesterday’s “Daily Article” on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website, by economist and Abe-Lincoln-hater Thomas DiLorenzo, is titled “TIME for Socialism.” It begins:
Anyone who is still wondering why the so-called “mainstream media” was so hostile toward Congressman Ron Paul’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination will
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Daniel Gross has a new piece in Slate on the economic boomtown that is Houston:
In May, the unemployment rate in the nation’s sixth-largest metropolitan area was a measly 3.8 percent. In the past year, Houston-based companies, which include 26 Fortune 500 firms, added 71,000 jobs to their payrolls. The local United Way closed out its
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I’d never heard of the classic 1957 BBC April Fool’s report on the Swiss spaghetti harvest before a friend brought it up at dinner a couple of night ago. Shows what a joke my education was. Anyway, here it is:
Some fun facts just in from JP Morgan’s economics team (I can’t find it online, but it presumably will show up eventually here):
* Emerging market economies accounted for the majority of global oil consumption for the first time in 2007
* Oil consumption was actually down in the developed world in both 2006 and 2007; it just rose enough …
My new column is online and in the issue of Time with the excellent cover story about a fence by the Next Editor of the Washington Post (well, maybe) inside. It begins:
Last October, I stood in the back of a packed Manhattan ballroom listening to hedge-fund manager David Einhorn explain to an audience what had gone wrong with Wall
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In a comment to my post on offshore drilling, odograph writes (and my Dad agrees):
If I could ask reporters to do one thing, it would be to always frame coastal reserves in terms of current consumption.
There is a strong (predictably irrational?) tendency to only mention the one-time gift this oil might give us in prices, and not where
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The Chinese government today announced a significant step toward tempering global demand for oil. It’s raising the price of gasoline and diesel fuel. Reports the WSJ:
The new hikes, which take effect Friday, are the biggest in four years, and will push the base prices up by 17% for gasoline and by 18% for diesel, the National Development
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I vaguely recall the great Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 (although I certainly didn’t remember that the initial blowout of Union Oil Platform A happened the day after my fifth birthday), and have more specific memories of getting tar on the bottom of my feet from walking on a Santa Barbara beach in the late 1980s. So I know why the …
A reader from Texas writes, apropos of my column about Richard Rainwater’s decision to cash in his big bet on rising oil prices:
My guess is Rainwater has always known how his $300m bet was going to turn into $3.5billion. Not because he’s the greatest investor or speculator of all time. He has no crystal ball. But he does have the
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