Well, the President signed those new credit-card regulations into law today. Now we wait and see if card companies start pulling back on credit lines and perks like we’ve been told they might. If that does happen, one option you might consider is borrowing against your 401(k). What 401(k)? you might be asking. Fair enough. But if there …

I’m getting kind of tired of Nouriel Roubini profiles (and one gets the sense that Nouriel is, too, although they’re clearly good for business), but Julia Ioffe’s piece in The New Republic nonetheless kept me reading to the end. I liked this quote from Bob Shiller:

“A financial crisis needs general thinking, and a team of specialists

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That question—which I hope doesn’t cause the Curious Capitalist to lose its PG rating—ran as a headline in Asia this past week. TIME Senior Editor Jim Erickson mentioned that to me over email after he saw the story I wrote about the usefulness—and danger—of economic metaphors, such as the ubiquitous “green shoots.” (Not an …

I have a new column in the issue with Michele Obama on the cover. It’s online here. It’s about my favorite hyperlibertarian economic doomsayer, Peter Schiff—a member of The Armageddon Gang I wrote about in March 2007. I also found a way to work in a quote from Scott Page, the Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, …

Laura Rowley has put together a handy list of the personal-finance lessons to be learned from NYT writer Edmund Andrews’ harrowing saga of mortgage disaster—told in his new book, Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown, and in an NYT mag article last Sunday. They’re all good lessons: Budget for the worst-case scenario, Know …

The Conference Board’s monthly Leading Economic Index came out today. It was up on the month for the first time since June 2008, and while forecasters had expected a rise it was bigger than the consensus estimate. So yay, right?

But markets were down after weekly jobless claims—one of those indicators that make up the Leading Index— …

I was listening in on a conference call about this new survey of people’s attitudes towards buying foreclosed houses, when RealtyTrac’s Rick Sharga mentioned that, nationwide, foreclosures are selling at a 31% discount to nominal market value. Every time the National Association of Realtors puts out a release about falling home prices, …

I like the Federal Reserve. It’s got more smart people working for it than any other governmental agency (or quasi-governmental agency) that I know of. They tend to see their job as doing what’s best for the economy (or at least the banking system), not scoring political points or aiding lobbyist friends.

Yet when you look back at the …

There has been some chatter, nicely summed up on the cover of today’s New York Times, that if Congress legislates new regulations for credit-card companies (the Senate is due to vote on a bill today), conscientious customers who pay their balances off every month will suffer. The idea is that if we deny card companies the ability to …

Wondering what will drive the U.S. economy forward in the coming years? I just got an e-mail from a PR guy for the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds that suggests an answer:

If you’re looking for a different angle to highlight involving America’s private campgrounds, you may want to focus on their increasing investments in

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Here’s the video version of my column on trying to make management into more of a profession:

Update: No it’s not here. I can’t get it to embed. But you can watch it on the TIME.com video page.

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