From Greg Ip’s Q&A with Greenspan on the W$J’s economics blog:
At the Fed you said housing was in a froth, but you avoided calling it a bubble. From the vantage point of 2007, can you say now that it was in a bubble? Oh yeah. Lots of froths are equal to a bubble… What was driving prices higher was essentially the aftermath of the
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So it turns out that the quotes that CBS released on Friday were actually the only things approaching news in the big Greenspan 60 Minutes interview Sunday night. Other than getting to see him at RFK with a Nats cap on his head, and learning that he wooed Andrea Mitchell by asking her to read a paper he had written on the Sherman …
This is a bit off topic, but the big news in the world of soccer blogs (and Morrissey blogs) this evening is that English pop melancholist Morrissey was on the sidelines at Thursday night’s Chivas USA-LA Galaxy superclassico (Chivas won 3-0) at the Home Depot Center, wearing a (red and white) Chivas jersey.
It’s decided, then. Major …
The ever-popular young collectivist (and future Spokesperson for the Jews) Ezra Klein writeth:
There was a great line at this morning’s Business and Health Care forum, attributed to Newt Gingrich, which went something like, “one man’s $200 billion in waste is another man’s $200 billion profit stream.” That’s about the most essential fact
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Time‘s infographics czar, Jackson Dykman, put together some very cool charts to accompany the print version of my new article on real estate. But my favorite among his creations was one we didn’t put in the magazine:
In case you’re one to read the fine print, ignore the thing in the chart credit about “rolling 12-month averages.” That …
Yesterday I posted a chart comparing the intended Federal funds rate set by the Federal Open Market Committee with the actual average interest rate that U.S. banks are charging each other for overnight loans. Since early August, the actual rate has been substantially lower than the intended one. It turned out CondeNast Portfolio blogger …
It all began to unravel with the whopper about the doctorate from the Sorbonne.
ABC reports that the TV network is reopening an investigation into former consultant Alexis Debat’s work. The impressively credentialed Debat had claimed to interview a journalist’s dream list of bold-name political stars:
Former President Bill Clinton,
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I’ve got a big article about the real estate slump online and in the new issue of Time, which inexplicably features presidential candidates’ spouses on the cover instead of, well, real estate (although I’ll admit that the scoop about Bill and Hill loving Grey’s Anatomy is bigger than anything I came up with). It begins:
The housing
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Everybody’s waiting to see if the Federal Open Market Committee decides to cut interest rates on Tuesday. But as the chart below shows, the Federal funds rate has already more or less cut itself:
I’m not entirely sure what the significance of this is. I imagine it’s a function of the guys at the open market desk at the Federal Reserve …
I drive around in a used 1998 Toyota Camry. It ain’t pretty. Last week I scraped the front right fender on our narrow garage opening. Its white exterior is plastered with bird poo. And the interior–whoa, mama. The floor is crusted with bits of pretzel, animal cookie and curled-up art projects. The back seat is sticky. Somewhere in the …
Greg Mankiw links to this paper (warning: pdf) by Washington University economics grad student Charles Courtemanche (he says on his Website that he’s on the job market), who contends:
that an additional $1 in real gasoline prices would reduce obesity in the U.S. by 15% after five years, and that 13% of the rise in obesity between 1979
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The Project for Excellence in Journalism has done an interesting, if not particularly surprising, analysis of the “news agenda” of user news sites like Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us (via Romenesko). Among the findings:
The news agenda of the three user-sites that week was markedly different from that of the mainstream press. Many of the
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