Maureen Dowd in the NY Times today said that we are currently struggling to get over our “affluenza. That condition, the bane of the middle class, is defined in a book of the same name as ‘a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.’” […]
The old definition – a path or a roadway over which something runs – has been updated for the times to mean: the length of time your company has until it runs out of cash. Jason Calacanis, a successful geek entrepreneur (and I use that word with all due respect) said the following: “You need […]
I know I said I wasn’t going to read anymore about the economy but I couldn’t help it, really, I couldn’t. The tag line to Friday’s The Motley Fool was “Is this the Market Bottom?”. I couldn’t resist it … I had to read it. You don’t need to read it, I’ve done the hard […]
As an economics major I’ve watched the economy ‘unravel’, to use Paul Krugman’s term, with a sense of increasing fascination combined with dread. I’ve often called it a ‘slow train wreck’. As a consultant to the remodeling industry I’ve noticed a certain tension in the air since spring 2008 as even the most successful and […]
Every Sunday morning I sit down with the NY Times and quickly move to the Business Section to read the latest from Ben Stein – we may not agree on many things, but his analysis of the current economy is usually spot to me! In the January 11, 2009 column entitled “Ordinary People vs. Extraordinary […]
If you’re half as interested as I am in how we got into our current economic mess you’ll want to read the New York Times Op-Ed piece of today’s date entitled “Where is our Ferdinand Pecora?”. “Under Pecora’s expert and often withering questioning, the Senate committee unearthed a secret financial history of the 1920s, demystifying […]
Adam Gopnik, in the January 5th issue of The New Yorker compares our current economic crisis with “the moment when a small child hits his forehead on a doorknob … and then the long seconds of red-faced anticipation, breath drawn, while everyone waits for the explosion of tears. ‘…we have all bumped our foreheads, hard, […]
Michael Lewis and David Einhorn begin this piece “AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics.” The article questions how a crisis of this magnitude could happen here – to the nation where “half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall […]
After failing physics and thereby failing to become an undergraduate in the school of architecture, I studied economics. This was before economic modeling gained the enormous advantage of computers to extract data from multiple sources and thereby build future assumptions. This ability is now called ‘econometrics’ and adds to the art of economics a scientific […]
Ben Stein writes 9 rules on the “economics of love” in the NY Times Business section of July 13, 2008 (I paraphrase): “…the returns in love .. are roughly proportional to the amount of time and devotion invested; High quality love … yields more return than junk; Research pays off; … returns are greater when […]