The stock market had an interesting day Thursday, with the Dow down 311 points. How interesting is that? Well, it is the second-biggest one day drop this year. But when you’ve got a number in the 13,000s, subtracting 311 just isn’t something to get too worked up about. Today’s 2.26% drop was just the 94th-biggest the Dow has experienced …
The Senate Finance Committee voted 20-1 this afternoon to send some “anti-pussyfooting legislation,” as John Kerry dubbed it, to the full Senate. I know because I was there for all the action at the lovely Dirksen Building. I also ate at the all-you-can-eat buffet in the basement and had a little bowl of Senate bean soup. Big fun.
The …
I always get a little irked when I read an article stating that the dollar has hit a “record low” against the euro. The euro’s been around for less than a decade, and happened to come into existence at a time when the dollar was extremely strong. Record lows against it are meaningless.
Of far more interest is the value of the dollar …
I use Google Reader to keep up with blogs that I think might be useful to me in my own blogging and columnizing.
Actually, that’s being far too generous to myself. For days, sometimes even weeks at a time, I use Google Reader to keep up with the 16 blogs whose feeds I’ve subscribed to. There are many other blogs and news sources that …
This little tidbit was in an interview in yesterday’s W$J (yes, I’m behind) with Ford CEO Alan Mulally. The interviewers asked him what had been the biggest surprise he’d encountered since coming over to Ford from Boeing last September. Mulally responded:
The biggest learning was the fact of how all our customers are aware of the brand
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A reader e-mailed to ask if it was possible to put together an inflation-adjusted chart of the S&P 500. Well, yeah: Anyone with Excel and an Internet connection can do it (the data here is from Yahoo! Finance and the Bureau of Labor Statistics). But I was curious, so I put together this chart going back to the beginning of the great …
In the new Time Asia, Wharton School prof and market guru Jeremy Siegel has a mostly optimistic take on the weak dollar and U.S. stocks (to be contrasted with the more sour one that I posted Thursday):
The weak dollar … makes U.S. asset prices attractive to foreign investors. U.S. interest rates are higher than those in Continental
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It’s not technically a column. It is, in Time parlance, a story in the well of the new issue, with “IRAQ” (or is it “A IRQ”?) on the cover. But you can’t tell the difference online. It begins:
Again and again in these past few months, financial markets have appeared to be on the verge of something very scary. It happened first and most
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The stock market has been breaking lots of records lately. Sort of. Wowsers! The Dow closed above 14,000 for the first time! Isn’t that exciting? Not really. In his NYT column Wednesday David Leonhardt made the point that it’s silly to get excited about such nominal-price milestones:
The S.& P. 500, which is a much better measure than
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All eyes (okay, some eyes; certainly not mine) have been on Ben Bernanke as he testified about monetary policy yesterday in the House and today in the Senate. In an interesting little essay in the latest Economist’s Voice, though, veteran Chicagoan Lester Telser argues that the Fed’s monetary decisions get far more attention than their …
Why is that 1,800 buildings in New York still get their power and heat from a century-old network of steam pipes? I mean, I know it’s all about the installed base. If you currently rely on steam, it would cost a lot to switch to more modern power sources. But at some point doesn’t the system become so archaic and dangerous that it’s …
Time‘s man in New Delhi, Simon Robinson, has an article on Time.com that deserves some more attention than it’s been getting. He writes:
As U.S. politicians line up to bash Beijing for its weak currency and gigantic trade surplus, one message they might want to offer their constituents is, buy Indian. Unlike China, Asia’s other emerging
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