Wondering why the banking sector’s problems keep failing to go away? Take a look at this chart:
Since the early 1980s, we Americans have been piling on debt. Much of that surely has been to the good, enabling us to enjoy our houses and cars and fridges while paying for them rather than waiting until we’ve saved up all the money. The …
This is a few days old, but nonetheless very much worth sharing:
When historians glance back at 2007 through the haze of their coal-fired stoves, they will mark this year as the onset of the Long Emergency – or whatever they choose to call the unraveling of industrial economies and the complex systems that constituted them. And if they
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The W$J has a big front-page story on Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne’s priorities:
During 10 critical days of this crisis — one of the worst in the securities firm’s 84-year history — Bear’s chief executive wasn’t near his Wall Street office. James Cayne was playing in a bridge tournament in Nashville, Tenn., without a cellphone or an
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I hesitate to share things that have already been shared by bloggers far more prominent than I (in this case Paul Kedrosky, who got it from Marc Andreessen), but this ITV comedy Q&A on the mortgage meltdown by John Bird and John Fortune is just too brilliant to pass up:
The description of the typical subprime borrower as an unemployed …
Business Week‘s Michael Mandel has this to say about the economy’s apparent resilience:
[W]e now may be in a world of mini-recessions–sharp falls in one or two sectors which do not pull down the whole economy. Think about the different parts of the economy as being connected by springs (or slinkys, if you want). A sharp drop in one
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Lex Hoogduin, chief economist for the big Dutch money manager Robeco (and columnist for Het Financieele Dagblad) stopped by this morning. Among the things he said was that when he makes a presentation in the U.S., he usually gets questions that seem aimed making him come out with a sunnier forecast than he really means to. In Germany, on …
Design by Curious Capitalist Jr. Carving by me.
The headline number in the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices released this morning was that U.S. home prices dropped 4.4% in the 12 months ending in August. But it’s in the metropolitan-area details that the Case-Shiller data gets really interesting. So with the help of Time.com graphics whiz Feilding Cage, I charted them:
Pretty …
More than a day after the WSJ and NYT declared in no uncertain terms that he was out, Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal finally “retired” this morning. I was starting to wonder if O’Neal might be staging some sort of rearguard save-my-job action, but I guess it just took time to negotiate a cushy enough exit package.
That should return …
After I wrote a couple weeks ago that New York was at a disadvantage to London as a financial center because getting through immigration as a foreigner at JFK is so much more unpleasant than at Heathrow, Financial Times columnist (and now blogger!) John Gapper has this to report:
When I arrived in London, I got through the queue for UK
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The Indian media are reporting that, only a few months after Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu passed up Bill Gates to become the richest man on earth, Slim has already lost that distinction. From The Economic Times:
Following a strong share price rally on in his three group companies, India’s most valued firm Reliance Industries, Reliance
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I’ll be doing one of my regular commentaries on the Nightly Business Report on PBS tonight. It’s about Microsoft, and how being unfashionable hasn’t kept it from making insane amounts of money. I taped it this morning with watery eyes, a scratchy throat, and a nose red from being blown every couple of minutes for the past two days. I did …
