The new Case-Shiller house price numbers are out today, and as you’ve probably already heard, they’re ugly. But they can be made pretty, and I got so much attention from other blogs the last time Time.com graphics czar Feilding Cage and I did this chart that I figured I had to post the updated version. Here it is:

Case-Shiller has …

With all the recent talk of a looming recession, I figured I ought to check in with Stanford economist Robert Hall, chairman of the Business-Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the semi-official arbiter of when recessions start and end. I e-mailed:

When everybody starts talking recession, as is this case

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With the news that the stock market is now officially in “correction” territory (it’s down 10% since October), I thought it might be interesting to check how bad things look if you adjust for the decline in the dollar. So I adjusted the S&P 500’s performance this year to reflect the value of the dollar in a trade-weighted basket of …

Menzie Chinn, who has been keeping an eagle eye out for signs that the rapid shrinkage of the federal deficit since 2004 might be coming to an end, finds them in the Monthly Treasury Statement for October. Tax receipts have clearly stopped growing as a share of GDP. Writes Chinn:

Seems to me a fair bet that, given current estimates for a

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From an article in Mediaweek (via Web Weekend Toronto):

Keith Blanchard, onetime editor of Maxim who worked on the sites of Wenner Media’s Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and Men’s Journal, sees print brands struggling to be responsible and authentic at the same time. “Perez Hilton was able to come up out of nowhere because he didn’t

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From the FT:

A Californian hedge fund has made more than 1,000 per cent return this year by betting against US subprime home loans, making it one of the world’s best-performing funds of all time.

Lahde Capital, set up in Santa Monica last year by Andrew Lahde, last week passed the 1,000 per cent mark, after fees, following the latest

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I’ve got a column in the new issue of Time with the brain map on the cover (or, in Europe, the inescapable mime), and online here. It begins:

In July 2006, the world’s oil rigs pumped out crude at a rate of nearly 85.5 million bbl. a day. They haven’t come close since, even as prices have risen from $75 to $98 per bbl. Which raises a

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Despite the apparent arrival of peak helium, they were still filling the Macy’s parade balloons with the precious gas Wednesday afternoon next to the Museum of Natural History. There were the usual brand names–Shrek, Mr. Potatohead, Pikachu. I’m pretty sure the snowman isn’t affiliated with any major media corporation, though. Neither …

From a note sent out this morning by Harm Bandholz, U.S. economist for Italo-German bank UniCredit:

[O]il-exporting countries have been continuing to channel the bulk of their petrodollars via London to the US … With rising oil prices, net purchases of US Treasuries made by the UK soared to USD 205 bn during the last 12 months. What

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I don’t think there’s a whole lot of reader overlap between The Corner and the Curious Capitalist, so here’s the bulk of Ramesh Ponnuru’s latest response to my response to his response to my critique of his inaugural Time column:

The tax break for employer-provided coverage would stay on the books, although it would be flattened so as

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Ultimately, what we are witnessing is a second Nixon shock played out in slow motion. And the Fed’s dual mandate ensures that John Connally’s remark from 1971 holds true today: “the dollar is our currency, but your problem.”

That’s from a post by Macro Man, a trader who appears to know what he’s talking about. It’s almost a week old, …

There’s really nothing people like reading more than blog posts about panel discussions where journalists sit around talking about blogging. (Seriously: I got some major uptake the last time I wrote one.)

Anyway, I was on a panel Saturday afternoon in some kind of outbuilding of Jay Gould’s old mansion in Tarrytown, NY. The event was a …