Thanks to the falling prices of used vehicles, especially trucks and SUVs, GM and Ford are scaling back their leasing programs, and Chrysler is getting out of the game altogether. This morning I had a chat with Sergio Stiberman, the CEO of LeaseTrader.com, and he had some interesting data from the secondary market. LeaseTrader.com is a …

I’ve tried to make the case before that the horrible times afflicting the nation’s metropolitan daily newspapers have far more to do with the collapse of a monopoly distribution model than with the quality of reporting in those newspapers. But now Paul Davis, publisher of the weekly Tuskegee News in Alabama, is making me do it again (via …

I did a bunch of interviews for my Hank Paulson article that didn’t make it into the piece. One of the most interesting was with William L. Silber, the Marcus Nadler Professor of Finance and Economics at NYU’s Stern School. Silber is the author of When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins …

On Monday, July 28, my TIME colleague Michael Duffy and I paid a visit to the Treasury building in Washington to talk to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Parts of the interview made their way into my article in the current issue of the magazine. After the break, you can read some more parts. The interview was pretty long (just over an …

Dan Gross wonders about Wal-Mart’s latest clumsy effort to help the Republicans:

Wal-Mart’s brass plainly believes—no, know—that a Republican president would be good for Wal-Mart, while a Democrat would be bad. Despite Clinton’s Arkansas roots, most Wal-Mart executives probably opposed Clinton in both his successful campaigns. But

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I figure I’ve blathered on enough about windfall profits taxes, so how about another proposal in Obama’s energy plan–selling oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

There are 700 million barrels of oil in the SPR–enough to cover just over a month of current U.S. oil consumption, or two months of oil imports. The original …

Continuing on Monday’s windfall-profits-taxes-are-hard theme, here’s Australian economist Andrew Leigh (via Mark Thoma):

From an economic standpoint, the strongest argument for a windfall tax is that it has the potential to be non-distortionary. A one-off windfall tax levied on past profits should not change firms’ behaviour, since it

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Today JetBlue said that it will start charging $7 for a pillow and blanket. You get to keep the pillow and blanket, and ostensibly both are clean—marketed, in fact, as “The World’s Cleanest(tm) travel pillow and blanket kit”—but still, this is very sad. Makes me nostalgic for a time I never knew, when air travel was elegant, when we …

Barack Obama has renewed his call for a windfall profits tax on oil companies. A couple of months ago I said I was about to write something about windfall profits taxes. Never did. Why not? Because windfall- profits-tax opinion pieces are hard.

Actually, that’s not quite true. They’re pretty easy if you just focus, to the exclusion of …

Bill Gates wrote a story for this week’s issue of the magazine about creative capitalism—his phrase for applying market forces and business know-how to solve the world’s problems, like mass poverty. It’s one part corporate social responsibility (caring about “stakeholders,” not just shareholders), one part Fortune at the Bottom of the …

Mark Zandi, the co-founder and chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, stopped by on Thursday afternoon. He was here to promote his new book, Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis, and Barbara and I will get to that later. But he also moonlights as a John McCain …