I’m lazy. You are, too. If we had our way, everything would come to us via silver platter at the snap of our fingers: groceries. Clothing. Jobs. So when a new online jobhunting service promised to do all the work while I sat here, bony ass on my grubby non-Aeron office chair, I decided I would do a favor to all you other lazy workers and …
What American football needs: No helmets and short shorts
Mrs. Curious Capitalist, talking yesterday about the paralyzing injury to Buffalo Bill Kevin Everett, wondered if someday football would retreat to the sidelines of American sports, its terrible health consequences for so many players ruling it out as a game for with appeal for regular folks. After all, boxing used to be the most popular …
Harvard’s endowment just can’t get (or at least keep) good help anymore
This just in from the W$J:
Mohamed El-Erian, head of the company that manages Harvard University’s $35 billion endowment, is resigning from that position to return to Pacific Investment Management Co.
Mr. El-Erian will start at Pimco in January as the Newport Beach, Ca.-based firm’s first co-Chief Investment Officer and Co-Chief
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A former FBI agent is vetting your resumé
If you’re a hotshot angling for an exec job at a big New York City company, chances are Ken Springer is on your tail. He’s the president of an innocuous-sounding outfit called Corporate Resolutions, and it’s his business to dig out your dirty laundry, give it a good sniff–then tell your prospective boss all about it.
Springer visited …
Where markets head now, according to Rich Bernstein
Merrill Lynch’s Richard Bernstein is one of the few investment strategists on Wall Street whose writings are worth paying close attention to. Back in January, for example, he wrote this about how financial markets would eventually be shaken from their complacency:
We view financial risk much like popcorn popping in a microwave. Until the
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Does your dog care if you own your house or not?
Felix Salmon really hates entertainer/economist/half-informed-pontificator Ben Stein’s column in the Sunday New York Times business section (actually, I suspect that there’s a love/hate thing going on there, but whatever). This Sunday, Stein wrote:
Owning your own home is generally considered the bedrock of the American dream, so this is
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The end of Marty Feldstein’s 30-year reign at NBER
Harvard economist Martin Feldstein is calling it quits after 30 years of running the National Bureau of Economic Research. I think this is a really big deal: Feldstein took over a mostly moribund NBER in 1977 and established it as possibly the most important arbiter–certainly more important than any one academic journal–of what …
If only Niall Ferguson had been your mortgage banker (instead of that Mozilo guy)
Back in July, in Countrywide Financial’s quarterly earnings conference call, CEO Angelo Mozilo uttered these memorable words:
Nobody saw this coming. S&P and Moody’s didn’t see it coming, but they simply just downgrade bonds, they don’t take hits. Bear Stearns certainly didn’t see it coming. Merrill Lynch didn’t see it coming. Nobody saw
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Real estate in Florida: Apart from the collapse of the housing market, it’s great!
I know that mocking the nation’s real estate trade organizations for their perpetual sunny optimism in the face of bad news has been getting mighty fashionable lately–maybe too fashionable. But this little item from the National Association of Realtors’ house publication is just too precious to ignore:
University of Florida study
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Real estate starts to pull the economy down
The August drop in employment that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning surprised a lot of people. You can’t really blame them: It was the first monthly decline since 2003, the numbers had been moderately strong in recent months, and the survey was conducted in the first half of the month, missing a couple of very …
I’m too lazy to return our toxic toys
I know, I know. Sitting innocently in my child’s playroom is a pile of brightly colored, ticking time bombs. Having read Jyoti Thottam’s story in this week’s TIME, “More Trouble in Toyland,” I should be nauseous with the fear so familiar to my generation of neurotic parents:
Mattel’s recent recalls of more than 19 million
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Have professional investors made markets more volatile?
I put together this chart for my column this week, but it was (correctly) deemed too confusing for Time readers. On the assumption that readers of this blog are a hardier breed, here it is:
The idea was to investigate whether stock market volatility had risen or fallen as professional investors (mutual funds, pension funds, etc.) took …