NPR’s Planet Money and This American Life, in collaboration with ProPublica, have once again produced a brilliant piece of journalism about the financial crisis, this time focusing on the machinations of an evil-genius Wall Street hedge fund that made a killing by deliberately inflating the housing bubble while simultaneously betting that it would pop, thereby helping wreak incalculable havoc on… Read more »
My liberal readers will already agree with what I’m about to quote, and my conservative readers will immediately dismiss it because the link goes to nytimes.com, so I don’t know why I bother — but for what it’s worth: Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers… Read more »
Courtesy of last Monday’s Planet Money podcast (which I just listened to this morning), here’s a gloriously dorky hip-hop video produced by EconStories.tv, featuring John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek debating about economics — in rap form. Heh. Brilliant!
Alan Sullivan: “When [investors] realize the V could really be a W, they will panic again.” He’s talking about a V-shaped or W-shaped recession, of course. On the bright side, at least we’d know which president to blame for a “W”-shaped recession. Heh. (We’d better hope we don’t get an “O”-shaped recession, since that would involve the economy actually going… Read more »
You’ve probably already heard about this story: A recent college graduate is suing her alma mater for $72,000 — the full cost of her tuition and then some — because she cannot find a job. Trina Thompson, 27, of the Bronx, graduated from New York’s Monroe College in April with a bachelor of business administration degree in information technology. On… Read more »
Many years from now, when historians look back on this decade, which day will they say “changed the world” more: 9/11/01, or 9/15/08? Perhaps the answer is 9/11 simply because it was more of a self-contained event, which, all by itself, set enormous changes into motion — whereas the collapse of Lehman Brothers was merely one catastrophic event among many… Read more »