General Motors has submitted its 37-page “Restructuring Plan for Long-Term Viability” (a.k.a. request for an $18 billion bailout) to Congress. There’s still a lot of defensive hey-we’re-already-totally-competitive-so-just-lay-off stuff in it (16-17 pages worth, I’d say), and of course a lot fuel-efficiency-is-job-one stuff to appease the …
Did Tina Fey’s scar affect her career?
You’ve doubtless heard all the buzz about the January Vanity Fair cover flaunting Tina Fey, as photographed by Annie Liebowitz and profiled by Maureen Dowd. (Talk about a PR juggernaut over there at Condé…and how come Tina hasn’t graced the cover of TIME yet, I ask you? The Sarah Palin cover doesn’t count.)
Don’t toss out the brand with the bathwater
Sometimes, when I tell young people where I work, I add a little explainer. “TIME. It’s a magazine. Sold on newsstands. It’s got a red border. No, not the Times. No, not Newsweek, you little cretin. TIME.”
The Detroit Three’s slow trip back to Washington
Alan Mullaly will be driving in a Ford Escape hybrid. Rick Wagoner will travel in a Chevy Malibu hybrid. Bob Nardelli hasn’t figured out how he’ll get there yet, but taking a private jet is out of the question. It’s not quite carpooling in a minivan, as I suggested they do a couple weeks ago, but it’s close enough.
It’s mostly silly …
Motion sickness quantified
You may have noticed that yesterday was a rough day for the market. And last week had gone so well, too. Shoot. This morning I was talking to some folks over at the electronic trading platform Liquidnet, and one of them pointed me to a Citigroup report that lends nice context to the recent volatility. Here’s a look at some different time …
Are Citigroup’s troubles evidence that Glass-Steagall repeal was a colossal mistake?
Having made the argument a couple of months back that repealing the Glass-Steagall Act was a good thing because it allowed J.P. Morgan Chase to buy Bear Stearns and Bank of America to (maybe) buy Merrill Lynch, I’ve been feeling a little guilty about not having revisited it yet in light of Citigroup’s troubles. So here goes:
It was the …
The memo can wait. It’s Cyber Monday!
Today is a big shopping day for office workers as we put our deadlines aside, crack our knuckles and start clicking on online holiday sales. Reports CNN.com,
“Cyber Monday,” the first weekday after Thanksgiving, usually sees the first spike in online spending habits for the holiday season. That’s in part because people are shopping from
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It’s a recession! Finally! A real recession!
The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the semi-official arbiter of whether we’re in a recession or not, has finally made the call:
The committee determined that a peak in economic activity occurred in the U.S. economy in December 2007. The peak marks the end of the expansion that began in
…
Go read some of Tanta’s mortgage-wonkery classics
On the sad occasion of the death of Doris “Tanta” Dungey, I’ve been hunting through her classic collection of Compleat Ubernerd posts about the mortgage business for some commemorative excerpts. But the whole point of these long, mostly brilliant essays on the workings of REMICs, TACs, PACs, CDOs, ABSes and the like is that they are …
Americans keep shopping, despite everything
So after all the worrying, the first weekend of Christmas shopping turned out to be … okay. From CNNMoney:
The National Retail Federation (NRF), an industry trade group, said shoppers spent $41 billion in the 4-day Thanksgiving weekend. The average shopper spent $372.57, up 7.2% from the $347.55 spent last year.
What we’ve seen so …
So is uncertainty a reason to freak out or an opportunity?
The future seems especially uncertain at the moment. There are those who would object that the future is always uncertain, and that it is when we think we’ve captured it in our forecasting models that we’ve invariably gotten things terribly wrong. But still, it is possible most of the time to be reasonably confident that one knows the …
New article: Why Obama can’t wait
There’s an article with my name on it in the new issue of TIME (with Michelle Rhee on the cover). My involvement with it was extremely limited–Massimo Calabresi and Michael Duffy in the Washington bureau did almost all the work–but it seemed rude to ask to have my byline removed. Plus, it’s a perfectly good article. Why not get the …