That’s the view from the front door of the house in semi-upstate New York that the Curious Capitalists have rented and stuffed with assorted in-laws for Thanksgiving. Happily, the house is well insulated.
Here’s hoping your turkey is well brined, salted, seasoned, whatever. Even if you live outside the Thanksgiving zone.
In the opening chapter of his great history of the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple, William Greider describes Jimmy Carter’s choice of Paul Volcker as Fed chairman in 1979 in epochal terms:
At that moment, few in the White House appreciated what would become obvious in the next few years, that this was the most important
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The President-elect has announced the appointment of yet another slate of high-profile economic advisers, the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, with Paul Volcker as chairman and long-time Obama guy Austan Goolsbee as the head staff guy. So there’s that, the National Economic Council headed by Larry Summers, the Council on …
Editor & Publisher reports:
When a newspaper cuts its staff, those who remain in the depleted newsroom become valuable. But as The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. slowly says farewell to 151 newsroom folks who took buyouts last month, at least two longtime journalists have been reassigned to the mailroom.
Maybe it’s because I’m an “economic leader.” At least, that’s what it says on the cover of this new book:
The book grew out of the Creative Capitalism blog that Michael Kinsley and Conor Clarke organized over the summer. My contribution was previously posted here. Making a book out of a blog seemed kind of pointless to me at first, …
Jason Zweig, one of the best financial journos out there, went to town on conspicuous consumption today. Seriously, until you don’t have enough money to take public transportation, do not try to bellyache about your stock-market losses around Jason.
His piece, entitled “What a Bear Market Might Teach Us,” is part of a burgeoning …
My friend Barbara Kiviat over at Curious Capitalist sends me this news (from Reuters): Cisco is shutting down most its U.S. and Canadian business for five days to cut costs by more than $1 billion.
Imagine the memo. “DEAR STAFF: Please stay home for the holidays. In an effort to save your jobs and our company, we’re going to give you …
For all those people out there who want to know why they’re not seeing more of this government bailout money directed at ordinary folk, boy do I have an acronym for you.
Meet TALF, the Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility. This morning the Treasury Department announced that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY—pronounced, …
The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index rose a bit this month, after hitting an all-time low in October (the measure goes back to 1967). I don’t know that it means all that much, but it is an indication of something that should start playing out more broadly in economic data releases–and perhaps injecting a touch of optimism into …
I think it’s pretty clear what Barack Obama was up to in choosing Tim Geithner to be his Treasury Secretary and Larry Summers his chief White House economic adviser. He knows we’re in a serious economic crisis, and he wants people who know what they’re doing and can get stuff done, quickly.
As for Summers, who has got to be the first …
Imagine there was this industry–Industry A–that had been flying high for years. It benefited from major regulatory shifts, and changes in the tax code. Its employees were the highest paid of any industry. Then it landed in a crisis entirely of its own making. It had been manufacturing defective products and selling them around the …
There are a lot of parallels between the deal unveiled overnight to restore confidence in Citigroup and the terms of the FDIC-arranged merger with Wachovia from September that never went through. A big pool of assets (now $306 billion, then $312 billion) is set aside, Citi agrees to take the hit on the first few billion (now $29 billion, …
