In the summer of 1999, I paid a visit to a little startup in downtown Palo Alto. I was working on a Fortune article about Inktomi, then the new power in Internet search, and the startup was a nascent competitor. I sat down with its president–a kid named Sergey–and he questioned Inktomi’s strategy of building its business around big …
Weekend reading: Becks as a (shrilly yapping) manager
Since I’ve already established that David Beckham is an appropriate topic for a business and economics blog, I thought I’d share this, from the Guardian blog of hairy English pop-culture phenomenon Russell Brand. Brand, like me a West Ham fan (but unlike me a genuine one, with a season ticket and all), has visions of Becks spurning the …
New Century and the delusion of being better than the rest
This, from a comment Thursday by one Peter Varhol, deserves its own post:
I’ve lived through a couple of real estate downturns now, and the cause always seems the same – lenders loosen standards (inflated appraisals, mortgages at 105% of selling price, inflating income, etc.) to chase more business. Will they never learn from the
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Changing Careers Might Help You Find Passion for Work
What’s the point? What’s it all for? Where’s my life going? When do I get there? Is this all there is? What do I really want to do?
When these are the questions that keep you up at night, you call a man named Curt Rosengren.
Rosengren calls himself a “passion catalyst.” He’s a Seattle-based career counselor who works with up to 50 …
Google’s complicated relationship with us media dinosaurs
My new column is up online, and in the gloriously amazingly redesigned new Time (the paper’s thicker, too). It’s now in something called the “Life” section, which until the very last second we were simply calling “Part 3.” It’s accompanied by a photo of me looking slightly glum, or so I thought until I saw Richard Brookhiser positively …
So why exactly is it that Alan Greenspan is still grabbing headlines and moving markets?
Now I didn’t actually hear what former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan said today down in Boca Raton. But I couldn’t avoid reading about it, given that his words got big play on most of the financial news sites:
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session at the Futures Industry Association meeting, Greenspan conceded it was “hard to find
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Why Do We Work? One Career Changer’s Answer
Why do we work?
On the face of it, that’s a stupid question. We work to put food on the table and a roof over our heads, of course. We work toward the prospect of children in college and ourselves in rocking chairs. In other words: we work because we have to.
TIME is running a series of stories called Why We Work in which we explore …
Bob Kuttner tells newspapers how to make money
Robert Kuttner‘s big article on the economic future of newspapers in the current Columbia Journalism Review is a must-read–if, that is, you care about the economic future of newspapers.
A couple things stand out. One is Kuttner’s description of the daily reading habits of a certain scarily productive 22-year-old Mainstream Blogger.
I
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A user’s guide to economic forecasts
As best I can parse it, there are four ways to forecast the economic future. None of them works very well, but each has its uses. And with lots of people right now wondering whether the subprime lending mess and the global stock market jitters presage an economic downturn, I think it might be helpful to trot out my taxonomy (additions, …
Goldman dives into subprime lending
This was in today’s W$J:
Seeing growing turmoil in the market for risky home loans as an opportunity, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is looking at pushing deeper into the business, ramping up its own subprime-lending operation and pondering the purchase of another.
To me this is an indication that the subprime mortgage meltdown isn’t going to …
What’s different about the real estate market now vs. 2002
I wrote Tuesday that the latest market-wide numbers on mortgage foreclosures and delinquencies showed them to be at lower levels than in 2002.
But there is a crucial difference between now and then. In 2002, the foreclosures and delinquencies were the product of an economic downturn and this time around they might turn out to be the …
Oh no! The mortgage market is almost as troubled as way back in … 2002
There were a lot of headlines today about the bad news in the Mortgage Bankers Association’s quarterly delinquency survey. Fair enough–mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures are up, and the percentage of loans entering the foreclosure process in the fourth quarter of 2006 (0.54%) was the highest on record.
But still, the overall …