First, go read Henry on the lambasting of, especially, Turkey by U.S. idiots. Apparently, any U.N. vote is wholly the responsibility of everyone except the people who presented the resolution. Note also that the editorial page has a much more interesting piece on economics than all those Zogby myths. Maybe more about that later, but […]
We can only hope that the special Infrastructure supplement in today’s edition of The Pink One was written and/or edited by a PwC, not an FT, employee. Otherwise, how are we to explain Michael Peel’s curious declaration in “Unweaving a Tangled Web” that: …[there is a] continued prevalence of corruption around the complex, lucrative, and […]
Steve Jobs is promising a lot of stuff that AT&T is not capable of delivering. Someone needs to explain to me why Steve Jobs is a Brilliant Leader.
No, not that anyone should pay her $15,000-$30,000 to talk to teenagers about why they should be abstinent. (Short version: “As with my mother, I wasn’t, and look what I’m doing now. Uh, well…”) But, via Andrew Samwick, a study from the Pew Foundation (PDF) using PSID data finds that: Among children who start in […]
One of the nice things about going to the Kauffman Foundation this year was meeting up again with Peter Klein of Organizations and Markets, who was my first economics professor.* (I liked him as soon as I found out one of his first publications dealt with “moral hazard” and the Designated Hitter.) Peter has a […]
How else to explain a 20% drop in prices since The Destruction of the Gulf of Mexico? Oil fell below $70 Monday, reaching a low of $69.27 before rebounding slightly…The turnaround has been sudden — oil hit an 18-month high of $87.15 a barrel during trading on May 3. The plunge in oil extended to […]
No wonder Brad DeLong has had no luck persuading Christopher Edley to get rid of the malfeasant John Yoo. As Bob Somersby observes: Christopher Edley thinks he’s one of your “betters.” It’s hard to believe, but that’s the exceptionally low-IQ framework this self-proclaimed member of the elite enunciated in Sunday’s piece. According to Edley, rubes […]
The opening chapter of Jack Cashill’s Popes and Bankers relates his version of the tale of Melonie Griffith-Evans, a woman who in 2004 borrowed her way to losing her house. Ms. Griffith-Evans accepted loans in order to buy a house priced at $470,000 that resulted in her having to pay “roughly $3,500 a month.” Of […]
Sometimes, I hate being right. Most of those times are when I take a pessimistic view of data; this has happened a lot recently. It gets worse when the people who agree with you are none other than The Giant Vampire Squid. As the Wall Street Journal notes: Zero — First quarter GDP growth, minus […]
One of the things that goes without saying these days is that a recovery doesn’t lift all boats. It doesn’t lift all banks, either. For your consideration, the number and documented costs (in $MM) of bank closings in the U.S. since 2000.