It must be some sort of indication of where we are in the economic cycle when major publications start doing big stories on the people who make the most pessimistic predictions. Anyone read the “Dr. Doom” profile of NYU economist Nouriel Roubini in the New York Times magazine over the weekend? It reminded me of Fortune‘s recent cover on …

I was in Chicago this weekend, and when I told my friend that I liked the t-shirt she was wearing, she mentioned that she’d bought it at Threadless. This caught my attention because Threadless was one of the companies Jeff Howe and I talked about on Friday. Threadless asks people to submit t-shirt designs online, and then visitors to the …

And that’s interesting because he’s the one who coined the word crowdsourcing in the first place. In Wired magazine two years ago, he described how companies are harnessing big groups of people, like customers or the broader Internet-using public, to come up with marketing campaigns, solve tough R&D problems, even gin up ideas for new …

When Freddie Mac said that it would no longer buy subprime loans from New York because of a new homeowner-protection law there, I put in a call to Richard Neiman, superintendent of the New York State Banking Department. I thought to call him because just the week before we’d been talking about all the good things that new law is supposed …

Christine Fahlund, a senior financial planner at investment manager T. Rowe Price, stopped by and shared a cool chart showing how much more money you get in retirement if you keep working for even just a few more years. It wasn’t the first time she’s had this conversation, but I still thought it was interesting—perhaps even …

UBS, which is among the banks most battered by the credit crunch, said today that it would separate its flailing investment bank from its lucrative business of managing money for rich people, and, adding in its asset management arm, now exist as three autonomous divisions. Writing down more than $42 billion in assets over the course of a …

This morning The Daily Deal told me that Wallstrip has a little West Coast competition. I don’t know if I’d go that far.

Jesse Draper, recent UCLA theater grad, cable TV actress, and, oh yeah, daughter of venture capitalist Tim Draper (see, for context: Hotmail, Skype, Baidu), is Valley Girl (original and timely), a big-smiled, …

Grisly news today from the Federal Reserve’s July survey of senior bank loan officers. Loan-writing standards are tighter across the board, but especially for prime mortgages (74% of banks reported tighter standards, compared to 62% in the April survey), and credit card loans (67% of banks reported tighter standards, compared to 32% in …

My colleague Jim Poniewozik’s epic post about why he didn’t write about the John Edwards affair sooner got me to thinking about a story I haven’t yet shepherded into print—the rent-ratio heat maps at Hotpads.com. Okay, not exactly equivalent, but I wanted an excuse to mention Jim’s amazing post, which was eye-opening even to someone …

I couldn’t help but notice over the weekend that there are some people in China playing some games. But what, I found myself asking, will it all mean for GDP?

Brad Humphreys, a professor of economics at the University of Alberta, who co-authors a blog about the economics of sports, sheds some light on that topic and others in the …

I am about to leave on the Curious Capitalist family’s annual California vacation. Won’t be back in the office until August 25. I may do a couple posts from the road, or at least put up some pretty pictures, but basically this will be Barbara’s blog for the next couple of weeks. I told her not to obsess about posting every single day, …

Here’s what fueled much or maybe most of Wall Street’s growth over the last few years: Investment banks (and by that I also mean the investment banking arms of giant banks like Citigroup and UBS) found ever more ways to sell gobs of risky securities while

a) telling the buyers they weren’t risky, in many cases because the investment …