My new column is online and in the issue of TIME with a bunch of lists on the cover. It begins:
It was only on the first of December that we finally got formal permission–from the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)–to call what the U.S. economy is experiencing a recession. Just a few days
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In a hugely encouraging development, The New Republic reports that the Obama transition team hopes to avoid using the word “czar” in the coming administration. I’ve already had my say on this czarophilia, so I’ll let Kevin Drum, who tipped me off to this important news, get his two cents in:
Where did this whole czar business come from,
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Here’s today’s moment in economic history making: U.S. households are paying down their debt. It’s a brave new world for the Land of Conspicuous Consumption.
The Federal Reserve announced that for the first time since at least 1952, the amount of debt held by households—a.k.a., regular folk—is on the decline. The third quarter saw a …
Today Justin is out doing what in the news business we call “reporting.” He graciously suggested I take the relative radio silence to promote some stories I’ve recently written for Time.com. Seems I’ve fallen behind on the self-promotion. To right that wrong, let me draw your attention to a piece I wrote earlier this week about how banks …
Martin Wolf writes in today’s FT:
What are Germany’s characteristics? It has an overwhelmingly competitive manufacturing sector; it is a chronic surplus country, with structurally weak domestic demand (ameliorated briefly during unification); and it has managed to avoid any housing or domestic credit booms. Its elite appears
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For anyone out there thinking we were starting to get this whole credit crunch thing under control: kidding! Look what history-making we accomplished today (via CNBC.com via Reuters):
Investors fearful of deflation and riskier assets scrambled to hand over cash to the US Treasury in return for no interest at an auction Tuesday, while
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These last couple of weeks were pretty intense. Ever since my managing editor at TIME announced an open invitation for buyout volunteers, I’ve been a whirling dervish of pre-unemployment. What do I mean by that? I mean that no one in the history of buyouts has more thoroughly considered and weighed and analyzed and lost sleep over her decision.
Why exactly is that, every time we put a government official in charge of some big, less-than-well-defined task, he or she becomes a czar? (Car czar, drug czar, energy czar, cybersecurity czar, there must be more.) I get why Führer and duce aren’t gonna work. But there are lots of other options: emperor, king, queen, prince, archduke, …
When Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company last year, he finagled a way to make the employees themselves big owners—if the newspaper-and-TV outfit ever made a profit, that ownership structure would help with the tax bill. The news of Tribune filing for bankruptcy protection therefore made me a tad queasy. I had an Enron/WorldCom …
The big question looming over the push to rewrite the home loans of people struggling to make payments is whether or not such mortgage modifications keep folks in their houses for the long term. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a danger that loan modifications, at least the way they’re currently done, don’t solve the problem, just delay …
Barbara’s post last week about the spectacular (and historic) proliferation of days in which the S&P 500 has moved 5% or more this year raised a couple of questions. The data she cited just went back to 1950, so one question was, how does this year’s volatility compare with that of the 1930s? Another was, why the heck is it happening? …
It was family movie night at the Curious Capitalists, and amid all the economic gloom I feel compelled to point out that a nation that can produce The School of Rock is a nation that cannot kept down for long.
