The second version of the first quarter GDP numbers were released this morning, and they mark the economy down to a 0.6% annual growth rate from the 1.3% rate estimated back on April 27. If that gets knocked down a little more when the “final” version comes out June 28, then ratcheted down even more in the benchmark revision a year or …
Curious Capitalist Jr. has asked me to write a post about his friend’s older brother, Paul Lindseth, who made it to the quarterfinals of the 80th Scripps National Spelling Bee today before meeting his Waterloo in the word “oubliette.” Which apparently means “a concealed dungeon having a trap door in the ceiling as its only opening.” …
My neighbor Nathan Thornburgh (we share an office wall here at Time) has a fascinating article about guest worker programs in North Carolina in the current issue of the magazine that ends on this decidedly subversive note:
So what’s the solution? One clue can be found in the failed amnesty of 1986, widely viewed as the genesis of the
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The president’s choice of Bob Zoellick to be the new World Bank chief seems pretty obvious after the fact. He’s a loyal Bush soldier rather than an out-on-a-limb advocate like Wolfowitz, which means he’s less controversial among administration critics yet more likely to actually do what the administration wants, whatever that might be. …
A special treat for the millions of German-speaking Curious Capitalist readers: An interview I did with the Austrian daily Der Standard about Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones bid. I don’t think there’s much of anything in it I haven’t already said in this blog, so I won’t bother translating. But here’s a thrilling excerpt.
DER STANDARD: Warum
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Curious Capitalist regular Peter Varhol had an interesting comment on my China column. An excerpt:
I’ve always been confused by the spend versus save debate … What is bizarre, I think, is that while economists and economic writers such as yourself bemoan the lack of savings behavior in the US, tax policy decidedly supports spending
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I spent the weekend in a house full of old books. One of them was the Fiftieth Anniversary Report of Harvard’s Class of 1922, where I found this remarkable statement from Hartford lawyer/art-collector Joseph Louis Shulman:
To allow myself two regrets, one is that my wife has not been with me the past ten years, knowing as I do what a
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From the always excellent Bill Powell in Shanghai:
About 18 months ago, Liu Junling, an upwardly mobile single Chinese woman, had a conversation with her boss, the CEO of a large, politically connected real estate developer in Shanghai. For the previous five years, people in China’s largest city had lived and breathed the property
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My latest column is in the Time with the various not-left-behind kids on the cover and online here. It begins:
Over the course of this year, China’s government will find itself with more than $300 billion in new foreign-currency reserves, mostly dollars, that it will have to park somewhere. That’s in addition to more than $1 trillion
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I’ve been thinking it’s my duty as a business/economics blogger to say something about the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, but I’ve struggled to figure out what. Happily, Clive Crook takes care of at least part of the job in today’s FT (subscription required):
At a glance, the Senate proposal has much to be said for it.
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This morning, at about 9 a.m. The orange-ish blob in the middle is the Staten Island Ferry. And I know, the cameraphone isn’t really doing the job. But it was really nice down there, and I felt the need to share.
From the FT:
China will gradually take over the role of the US as the world’s largest manufacturer but will do this only by 2020, with the US’s position in the global league table of manufacturers remaining surprisingly strong, according to an authoritative economic study.
Global Insight, a Washington-based economics consultancy,
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