Economy & Policy

The sermon at my church Sunday was partly about real estate prices. (Is this a uniquely New York thing? Or do men and women of the cloth across the land regularly invoke the housing market?) The rector, a former lawyer who actually owned New York real estate back in the 1970s, said that back in those days nobody could imagine what …

So the Dow Jones Industrials fell 416 points today, which sounds like an awful lot, but really isn’t anymore. On Black Monday in 1987, a 508 point drop amounted to 23% of the Dow’s value. Today’s drop was just over 3%.

Still, there’s reason for there to be worry in the air. None other than Alan Greenspan has been warning for a few years …

A reader in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, sent me a letter (on paper! with a written in pen!) in response to my column a few weeks back about northern Virginia’s astounding, taxpayer-funded prosperity (“The Federal Job Machine“). Apparently Oshkosh Truck Corp., maker of “the world’s toughest specialty trucks and truck bodies,” is doing famously …

We’re more than five years into the current economic expansion, which means it’s entirely natural that we ought to be worrying about when it might end. This expansion has already lasted longer than most of its post-World War II counterparts, after all. Last year a few economists predicted that falling housing prices might send us into …

Something’s been bothering me about the XM-Sirius merger. Everything I’ve read seems to point to XM being the better-run of the two satellite radio rivals. Hugh Panero, the CEO since 1998, got his company’s radios to market first, signed better distribution deals than Sirius did, and has been running a significantly tighter ship. This …

At first the word was he was going to make a quarter of a billion dollars over five years. Then Grant Wahl reported in January that David Beckham’s L.A. Galaxy pay will be more like $50 million over five years. Now the AP tells us his base salary is actually $5.5 million a year.

At this rate, we should expect to learn soon that Becks is …

There’s no way I can keep up with or be one one-millionth as intelligent and informed as Corliss and Poniewozik, but I feel the call to say something about the Oscars.

So here it is: I’m pretty sure it’s BLAN-chut, not blan-SHETT. Back me up on this, Cate.

A little while back, in the august pages of Foreign Affairs, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby offered a rousing defense of hedge funds. It began:

Imagine two successful companies. Both are staffed by very smart people; both are innovative; both have an impact far beyond their industry, improving the productivity of the

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Due to a combination of being sick most of last week and supposedly being busy with an important “project,” I don’t have a column in this week’s Time. I did have a last-minute opportunity to write something about the XM-Sirius merger, but decided I didn’t have much of anything more to say than what I posted here on Tuesday. So it was …

When I saw the front page of today’s Washington Post, with its big story on Bill Clinton’s speaking-fee riches, it made me think of a sneaking suspicion I harbored while writing my working-for-free column last week.

The Post article says Clinton has gotten almost $40 million in speaking fees over the last six years:

His paid speeches

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There are those who say the New York Times‘ website has gotten so good you don’t need to read the newspaper anymore. But Website-only readers are missing two of the most interesting things in today’s paper: The full-page ads taken out by formerly beloved airline JetBlue and crotchety restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow.

The JetBlue ad, an …

I can’t really tell you whether the proposed Sirius-XM satellite radio merger will be good for consumers or investors. I do know who it’s got to be bad for: the talent. Nobody else will be getting deals like the five-year, $500 million contract Howard Stern landed with Sirius in 2005, that’s for sure.

This I learned from listening to …