The Curious Capitalist

The difference between not firing and hiring

Barbara Kiviat — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:35:54 +0000

Yesterday we got word that the Fed now expects the U.S. unemployment rate to hit between 9.8% and 10.1% by the end of the year before starting to decline in 2010. In April, the Fed thought we'd top out between 9.2% and 9.6%. No cause for celebration there. But then this morning we received a glimmer [...]

A day for self-promotion

Barbara Kiviat — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:07:21 +0000

First, Justin is about to take the mic at the Diane Rehm Show. You can listen live here. Second, the WSJ has named the Curious Capitalist one of the Top 25 Economics Blogs. I think that has a wee bit more to do with Justin than it has to do with me, but since I'm the [...]

The glories of a little bit of inflation

Justin Fox — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:15:49 +0000

The consumer price index jumped 0.7% (seasonally adjusted) in June, the biggest monthly rise since last summer. Most of the gain came from rising gasoline prices: the CPI excluding food energy (what they call core inflation) was up only 0.2%. And prices overall are still down 1.4% from a year ago. This ain't no inflationary [...]

Finland's 15-minute billionaire is still prospering

Justin Fox — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:58:26 +0000

When I saw the headline on my RSS reader it brought back all sorts of tech-bubble memories: F-Secure Pays €27.5 Million For French Storage Startup Steek, it read. Continued the TechCrunch Europe post: Finnish computer security provider F-Secure has acquired venture-backed French startup Steek for €27.5M in cash with the possibility of a further performance-based payment [...]

Goldman Sachs, vampire squid

Justin Fox — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:40:05 +0000

Thanks to the persistence and assistance of commenter audiospaceship, I finally read the samizdat version of Matt Taibbi's Goldman Sachs screed. (Rolling Stone only posted excerpts, and while I may still go out and buy a print copy, I wouldn't be able to link to it.) I generally liked it, and I actually learned a [...]

Credit ratings agencies: the problem that hasn't gone away, as much as we've tried to ignore it

Barbara Kiviat — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:55:06 +0000

Okay, so maybe that's not entirely fair. The SEC has signed off on some new rules and proposed some additional ones to try to temper conflict of interest at the companies that told us all those new-fangled mortgage-related securities were unlikely to ever go bad. Oops! And now SEC head Mary Schapiro is talking about [...]

Sarah Palin takes on the water-cannon threat

Justin Fox — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:45:33 +0000

Ezra Klein writes, regarding Sarah Palin's cap-and-trade op-ed in today's Washington Post, that its failure to mention "global warming" or "climate change" makes it "a bit like an op-ed that attacks firefighters for pointing pressurized water cannon(s) at everything but never mentions fires." I'm not absolutely sure the analogy is fair, but this did sound [...]

Goldman Sachs has had an excellent financial crisis

Justin Fox — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:55:32 +0000

Goldman Sachs reported earnings this morning, and it reported lots of them—$3.44 billion in the quarter ending June 26. That's well more than the $2.33 billion Goldman's made in the comparable quarter in 2007, back before the world started falling apart. In other words, Goldman may be emerging from this crisis in a better position [...]

Was the Washington Post's only sin that it apologized?

Justin Fox — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:25:50 +0000

Stan Collender writes a rousing defense of the Washington Post plan—since abandoned in the face of criticism/controversy—to charge for access to "intimate dinners" at publisher Katharine Weymouth's house: The only thing the Washington Post really did that was wrong is that it apologized. Other news outlets have been doing things like the Post was planning to do [...]

Behold the power of the potato

Barbara Kiviat — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:54:50 +0000

Historians have long sung the praises of the potato when talking about the boom in population and urbanization we saw in the 18th and 19th centuries. Potatoes are packed with vitamins and minerals—including, importantly, vitamin C—and can be grown on less land with less labor than wheat, barley and oats. When the potato showed up [...]