On the beach, At the park? In the pool? Feel free to keep doing nothing because that’s exactly what the market is doing. But if you still want to sound as though you haven’t been away all summer, here are a few facts to throw around at this evening’s barbeque.
First, stocks are going nowhere. Yes, they are making lots of headlines,
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There are two obvious ways to reduce the federal deficit (spend less or tax more), and then there’s the really compelling one—stop using the tax code to guide the way people make decisions. Bloomberg recently reported that the President’s debt commission is focusing “a lot” on tax expenditures—the deductions, exemptions and other tax …
“Fashion is made to become unfashionable.” — Coco Chanel
“Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.” — Elsa Schiaparelli
“A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.” — George Bernard Shaw
On Tuesday, August 5, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., any customer who wears orange is entitled to a free burger at Whataburger. The promotion celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of the chain, which has 700 locations in the U.S. (most in the South), and which proudly displays a bright orange logo.
Bored, without a job, facing the mini-crisis of turning 30, and inspired after watching “Julie & Julia,” Marisa Lynch decided to take on a new project last summer: For 365 days in a row, she would mend, cut, dye, stitch, and otherwise transform secondhand clothing into a new dress daily, and she would do so with a budget of just $1 a day.
Group-buying discount site Groupon is getting personal. Instead of offering one and only one daily deal to members in a given city, the site will select from a handful of deals and send you one you’re most likely to actually want.
The time is drawing near: Washington is gearing up to figure out how to deal with wards-of-the-state Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I’ve been reporting a homeownership piece for the magazine, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the U.S. system of mortgage finance, and I’ve come to a firm conclusion about what should be done with the GSEs.
Not paying off your debts can mean trouble. Bizarrely enough, paying off some of an old debt can mean even more trouble.
As the economy tanks, library use surges. Makes sense, right? The library is a magnet for the unemployed: Last year, 30 million peopled used the library to help in the quest for a job. Many unemployed have no Internet access at home, and so the library is the only place they can search online for employment. Tons of libraries also career …
Here’s another data point that gold and other things that are supposed to trade up when inflation spikes are in a bubble: The prices of books about hyperinflation are themselves hyperinflated (from Fortune):
Jens O. Parsson’s out of print economic treatise, Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations, is selling
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A Summer Sale from Levi’s offers jeans and other articles of clothing at up to 50% off, starting at $14.99. The retailer is also saying that free standard shipping is available for “today only”—though when you look at the fine print, it says that free shipping is available for purchases made by August 5.
The monumental credit card reforms that began taking effect last summer had some unintended consequences—namely soaring interest rates, higher fees, and less credit available. But mostly, the laws succeeded in stopping the banks and credit card companies from using the same old dirty tricks to get extra money out of customers—by, …
