Reader Patricia Love e-mails:
I’m losing money hand over fist. I’m losing it in my 401k (each month, I have less than I had the month before–and that’s after my 15 percent contribution), I’m losing it in my IRA, and I’m losing it in my Roth (neither of these accounts has a huge balance, but I’ve lost about 35 percent of its value). The
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“We’re fair game,” Jim Cramer said early in his conversation with Jon Stewart Thursday night. “We’re a big network. We’ve been out front. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve got 17 hours of live TV a day to do.”
“Maybe you could cut down on that,” Stewart suggested.
Cramer laughed, Stewart cut to a commercial break, and the topic didn’t come up …
Yesterday the Fed came out with its quarterly report on household wealth, showing that we were $11 trillion less rich at the end of 2008 than we were at the end of 2007. Our collective wealth has now dropped six quarters in a row—largely due to declines in stock prices and home values. (I should point out that technically this data is …
The Chinese-official-says-something-worrisome-about-the-dollar-or-Treasuries scare has by now become a pretty regular market phenomenon. What was new about Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s blunt words today were that they were blunter than usual, and that they were being spoken by Wen Jiabao, not a “high-level state economist” or “the …
My column this week is an attempt to explain why we keep bailing out the banks’ bondholders. As often happens with my wonkier columns, I did a lot of research on aspects of the question that turned out to be too arcane for my one page in the magazine. I may force them on the wonky, arcana-loving readers of this blog later today.
The Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County, Civil Branch didn’t need any new jurors today. So those of us who weren’t assigned to trials all got out at 11:30, and now we don’t have to go back for six years. Sweet! I was seriously considering just playing hookey for the afternoon and not telling anybody about it, but then …
For a long time—ever since the subprime mortgage market fell apart in 2007—people have been warning that credit cards were going to be “the next subprime.”
Well, there have been a whole lot of other next subprimes since then: non-subprime mortgage loans, investment banks, Scandinavian island nations (well, one Scandinavian island …
I’m sitting again in the jury selection room of the main state civil court building in downtown Manhattan, while in the federal court building next door Bernie Madoff has just pleaded guilty to all manner of horrific deeds (worst among them of course mail fraud). There were a bunch of TV crews on the steps of this courthouse as I …
The early (internal) versions of that list of the 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis included Yale University chief investment officer David Swensen (it was Barbara’s brilliant idea). Not because Swensen’s a bad guy—by all accounts he’s a great guy, and a brilliant investor. But so many less-talented endowment and pension fund …
One day of jury duty down. I ended up spending hours and hours in a small jury selection room with 29 of my fellow New Yorkers as we were quizzed about whether we could fairly adjudicate (do jurors adjudicate?) a civil case involving a woman who slipped and fell in a Manhattan office building. I allowed that I probably harbored a modest …
Yesterday afternoon I wrote a quick piece for Time.com about the great day the stock market had. Here it is. The gist:
The stock price of the beleaguered financial giant Citigroup jumped 38% today, to a whopping $1.45 per share. Shares are now down only 93% from a year ago.
That sort of context might prove useful for thinking about the
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The NYT has a story today about banks that want to return the money they took from the Treasury Department’s TARP stash because “the conditions have become so onerous.” Reporter Stephen Labaton makes it sound like this is a problem. I see it more as a necessary corrective to the biggest flaw with the original round of capital injections …
