Daniel Gross has a new piece in Slate on the economic boomtown that is Houston:

In May, the unemployment rate in the nation’s sixth-largest metropolitan area was a measly 3.8 percent. In the past year, Houston-based companies, which include 26 Fortune 500 firms, added 71,000 jobs to their payrolls. The local United Way closed out its

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I’d never heard of the classic 1957 BBC April Fool’s report on the Swiss spaghetti harvest before a friend brought it up at dinner a couple of night ago. Shows what a joke my education was. Anyway, here it is:

Some fun facts just in from JP Morgan’s economics team (I can’t find it online, but it presumably will show up eventually here):

* Emerging market economies accounted for the majority of global oil consumption for the first time in 2007

* Oil consumption was actually down in the developed world in both 2006 and 2007; it just rose enough …

My new column is online and in the issue of Time with the excellent cover story about a fence by the Next Editor of the Washington Post (well, maybe) inside. It begins:

Last October, I stood in the back of a packed Manhattan ballroom listening to hedge-fund manager David Einhorn explain to an audience what had gone wrong with Wall

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Here’s the beginning of that story I mentioned yesterday:

Nearly 9% of all U.S. mortgages–or 4.8 million loans–are past due or in some stage of foreclosure. So when a company claims to offer distressed homeowners both relief from their mortgages and revenge against the bankers who saddled them with too much debt (“Give the lenders back

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In a comment to my post on offshore drilling, odograph writes (and my Dad agrees):

If I could ask reporters to do one thing, it would be to always frame coastal reserves in terms of current consumption.

There is a strong (predictably irrational?) tendency to only mention the one-time gift this oil might give us in prices, and not where

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The Chinese government today announced a significant step toward tempering global demand for oil. It’s raising the price of gasoline and diesel fuel. Reports the WSJ:

The new hikes, which take effect Friday, are the biggest in four years, and will push the base prices up by 17% for gasoline and by 18% for diesel, the National Development

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I was getting ready to go on CNN earlier today to talk about a story that’ll be in tomorrow’s dead-tree version of Time when I saw the breaking news about the DOJ and FBI busting 406 people, 60 of whom were arrested yesterday, for mortgage fraud.

The denouement of the three-and-a-half-month-long “national takedown” dubbed Operation …

I vaguely recall the great Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 (although I certainly didn’t remember that the initial blowout of Union Oil Platform A happened the day after my fifth birthday), and have more specific memories of getting tar on the bottom of my feet from walking on a Santa Barbara beach in the late 1980s. So I know why the …

A reader from Texas writes, apropos of my column about Richard Rainwater’s decision to cash in his big bet on rising oil prices:

My guess is Rainwater has always known how his $300m bet was going to turn into $3.5billion. Not because he’s the greatest investor or speculator of all time. He has no crystal ball. But he does have the

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I’m sitting here listening to Lehman Brothers executives explain how they lost $2.8 billion in the last quarter, and pledge not to do it again. CEO Dick Fuld started off the conference call a half-apologetic, half-gung-ho little speech, which I found entirely comprehensible. But then Fuld mentioned that he’d heard investors and analysts …