UPDATE: Justin rings in with a story on Time.com.
The spate of retailers reporting devastating December sales this morning provided a nice backdrop for President-elect Obama’s speech in Virginia about why we need to spend another $775 billion to fix the economy. About 40% of that sum comes in the form of tax cuts, but the bulk of the …
This TIME.com video visit to Jack Phelan Dodge Suzuki Isuzu in suburban Chicago was my doing, I think. I suggested at a meeting a few weeks back that a car dealer video might be cool, an editor said he’d check into it, and now it has magically appeared on our website. I had this image in my head of videotaping a desperate junior salesman …
Our blog posts here are always followed by a list of “Possibly related posts: (automatically generated).” In my early days at TIME these were embarrassingly useless, but now they’re pretty good, so when I saw the link under my post on Judd Gregg’s dubious tax math to something headlined “Taxes – So, is the U.S. tax system regressive or …
There are actually two other key central bankers, Hjalmar Schacht of Germany and Émile Moreau of France, in Liaquat Ahamed’s new book about the causes of the Great Depression, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World—but I felt the title for this post was getting a little long. I talked to Ahamed a few days ago about that …
Back in mid-December, after I wrote a post about some numbers from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) that seemed to show loan modifications don’t work so well, a reader of this blog suggested that the data release might be politically motivated—that the Bush administration, no fan of Sheila Bair’s crusade to rewrite …
In an otherwise not-all-that-objectionable op-ed piece in Monday’s WSJ, Republican New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg (or one of his staffers) writes:
The growth in tax revenues from 2002 through 2007 were some of the largest in history. The tax system became much more progressive, with the top 20% of income earners paying 85% of the taxes
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A lot of people have been calling Bernie Madoff’s apparent $50 billion Ponzi scheme the biggest financial fraud in history. Christopher McKenna, a business historian at Oxford University who stopped by TIME for a visit today, doubts it.
“I think Kreuger is bigger,” he says. “The question is how do you measure that. His losses were …
The House Financial Services Committee begins its Bernie Madoff inquisition this afternoon, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is sure to get its share of flack from both witnesses and committee members. Meanwhile, Sunday’s New York Times contained an epic tirade against the SEC and other blameful parties (mainly the rating …
Matt Philbin of the Business & Media Institute, which aims to expose the anti-free-enterprise bias of the mainstream media, finds fault with my list of the 12 things and people most to blame for our current financial mess. Here’s what seemed to bother Philbin most:
According to Time’s Justin Fox, the financial crisis and the recession
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In Saturday’s Washington Post, Joel “Nine Nations of North America” Garreau takes on Igor “The U.S. will break up into six parts by 2010” Panarin:
Never uncommon in North America is the geopolitical urge to take a walk for a pack of cigarettes. At any given time, there are as many as a dozen secession movements ongoing. The one getting
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My little foray into Austrian economics is now taking me down a rabbit hole that I really should climb out of (I’ve got work to do) but is just too fascinating to leave. Paleolibertarian, Rothbardian, Misesian Austrian economist Lew Rockwell responded to my post:
The author hilariously sees Austrian economics as divided into two parts:
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My old friend Bethany McLean, who was writing about Fannie Mae when writing about Fannie Mae wasn’t cool (so was I, but far more superficially), has an epic dissection of “Fannie Mae’s Last Stand” in the February Vanity Fair. It tries in places to be a typical personality-driven VF story, with former CEOs Jim Johnson and Frank Raines as …
