So I’ve already said what’s in it, but now my new column is up online and in the dead-tree issue of Time with the Prozac on the cover. It begins:
Eleven years ago, after doing a lot of studying and a lot of thinking, Richard Rainwater convinced himself that the long decline in oil prices that had begun in the early 1980s was about to
…
Billionaire investor Richard Rainwater has turned bearish on oil. Only temporarily bearish, mind you, but it still struck me as big enough news to write my column about this week. It’s not online just yet (update: now it is), but in the interest of serving this blog’s readers with the freshest possible news (and because Time‘s PR folks …
T. Boone Pickens was just here this afternoon. There’ll be more on that later, including some video from Barbara.
But anyway, we were all talking about how he now owns 10 million shares of Yahoo but doesn’t really know what Yahoo does (he’s piggybacking on Carl Icahn’s campaign to throw out the current management). He started talking …
At the nudging of the Schiff family, I just read through Ben Bernanke’s speech from Tuesday that generated lots of headlines because he said the word “inflation” and the word “dollar” in the same sentence. In the words of an e-mail blast I got from financial Armageddonist Peter Schiff:
Cheered by the fact that Ben Bernanke has finally
…
My favorite soccer blog, Du Nord, is being kept up by various guest contributors while its proprietor vacations in Ingerland. In the middle of a long Sunday post by indie-musician-turned-(via an interlude in the advertising business)-landscape-architect Matt Olson, one encounters this arresting passage:
I found myself sitting in the
…
It is very fashionable these days to declare that the Consumer Price Index is wildly understating actual inflation. I’m dubious, and my dubiousness may eventually lead to some actual reporting and maybe a column, but for the moment I rely on the judgments of people named David. First there was David Leonhardt a couple weeks ago in the …
My column this week begins with this image:
The giant ships from Asia steam into the Southern California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach laden with flat-screen TVs, flip-flops, copying machines, nail clippers, Thomas the Tank Engines and all the other necessities of modern life. They leave port a few days later loaded mainly with
…
I have a column in the issue of Time with a fire alarm on the cover, and online here. It begins:
The giant ships from Asia steam into the Southern California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach laden with flat-screen TVs, flip-flops, copying machines, nail clippers, Thomas the Tank Engines and all the other necessities of modern life.
…
We all know the U.S. is running a big trade deficit. Has been for years. We also know that the U.S. imports a lot of oil, the price of which has been going up staggeringly fast lately. But how much of a factor is oil in the trade deficit?
A really big factor, it turns out. Oil imports now account for most of the U.S. trade deficit, …
Tysons Corner, located just outside the Beltway in Northern Virginia’s Fairfax County, is the largest commercial district in Virginia and the 15th largest in the nation. It is one of the great American economic success stories of the postwar era, and is typical of the “Edge Cities” (or “technoburbs,” or–to be entirely prosaic about …
I’ve been spending some time perusing the Census Bureau’s foreign trade statistics. You can learn some remarkable things there. Such as that the U.S. is running dizzying surpluses in spacecraft ($150 million in exports to just about nothing in imports in the first three months of this year) and hides and skins ($426 million to $13 …
Back in March I blogged about the interesting and “mildly disturbing” tendency of Federal Reserve governors to bail out long before their terms expire. Now Fed governor Frederic Mishkin has announced that he’ll be returning to his teaching job at Columbia after just under two years of making monetary policy. That’s not quite a record: …
