Goldman Sachs Stumbles: The End of the "Vampire Squid"?
Photo: laverrue A few years ago, a friend of mine who used to work on Wall Street told me that the only stock anyone needed to own was Goldman Sachs….
Photo: laverrue A few years ago, a friend of mine who used to work on Wall Street told me that the only stock anyone needed to own was Goldman Sachs….
Wolfram Alpha has just launched a free?Widget Builder that lets you easily create widgets to calculate all kinds of things – seamlessly integrating data from the Alpha server.? (I’ve blogged…
James Surowiecki writes about one of this blog’s frequent topics of interest: financial illiteracy. Surowiecki includes insights from Annamaria Lusardi‘s research and Gary Rivlin‘s new book, Broke, USA. He proposes…
Are performance-based pay structures partly to blame for the mortgage crisis? Do our tastes in entertainment correspond to our political views? Do behavioral problems in kindergarten affect future school performance?…
Planet Money interviews Nassim Taleb, who recently participated in a Freakonomics quorum on financial reform, for its Deep Read series. Taleb compares the developed world’s dependence on debt to drug…
A revised bailout plan has been announced, and President Bush has thrown his weight behind it. To my eye, the rewriting of Paulson‘s plan this past week has been worthwhile;…
James Surowiecki explores the phenomenon of investor amnesia: Despite numerous examples of dishonesty and untrustworthiness, investors continue to trust Wall Street firms with their money. “It’s like what Hegel supposedly…
A Chicago company called Remote Sensing Metrics LLC has been using satellite images to track the number of cars in Wal-Mart parking lots, as a means of helping forecast earnings…
Easy credit also bad for bankruptcies. Gathering data on late adopters. (Earlier) Should people in poor health be allowed to donate organs? (Related)…
Photo: Andrew Magill Thanks to Time.com for naming this blog one of the top “financial” blogs — and the nice writeup from the Wall Street Journal‘s Robert Frank — but…
The 8th installment in Bob Dylan‘s “bootleg” series is a two-disc set called Tell Tale Signs, and it is set to be released next Tuesday (October 7). But until then,…
My friend who reviews New York City cafes came across this at Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner Center: Photo: Ana Dane According to Bouchon’s website: “Some people wish for…
Weary investors, take heart. Jeffrey A. Hirsch, editor of the Stock Trader’s Almanac is predicting good times ahead. Bloomberg reports that Hirsch is predicting “[t]he Dow Jones Industrial Average will…
(liquidlibrary) So by now you’re hopefully aware that the stock market completely bombed today. As I type, the Dow is down more than 500 points, its worst day since December…
In a new interview with The Telegraph, the Nobel economist Gary Becker offers an economist’s solution to immigration reform: charge immigrants for citizenship – $50,000 per immigrant to start. “A…
…about their finances (even some of my colleagues at Yale Law School). And in this part of the book, Shiller too strongly embraces the notion that the subprime crisis was…
It’s a well-documented truth that many Americans are financially and economically illiterate – a handicap that some believe contributed to the recent financial crisis.? A 2008 paper by?Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia…
In recent years, the effects of microcredit, particularly the high-interest loans offered by for-profit lenders, have been hotly debated. New research (abstract; PDF) from Dean Karlan and two co-authors, which…
…a paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Development Economics, Jonathan Zinman and I apply this approach to the question of how the poor spend their microfinance loans. Now, to be…
Some people invest in stocks, others invest in lobbyists. Still others, The Wall Street Journal reports, are investing in assault rifles. Just as Slate laments spring as the start of…
In today’s Wall Street Journal, E.S. Browning has written a quietly important article (gated) about the fact that stock-market returns are almost never adjusted for inflation. While most shrewd investors…
This morning, my six-year-old son Solomon was having breakfast and watching his favorite TV show, Really Wild Animals. (It’s a great show, National Geographic cinematography with quippy narration by —…
What is this photo about? It came to me courtesy of Jan Chipchase, a design guru who spoke at a great meeting last week on how to help microfinance…
…to Samuelson (1969): [A high salary in the future] does?justify leveraged investment financed by borrowing against future earnings. But it does not really involve any increase in relative risk-taking once…
Via the Wall Street Journal, here’s further evidence that companies “tweak” quarterly earnings numbers. Joseph Grundfest and Nadya Malenko analyzed almost half a million earnings reports from 1980-2006. They discovered…
University of Chicago Professors Douglas Diamond and Anil Kashyap, whose description of the causes of the financial crisis is the most widely circulated post ever to appear on this blog,…
For college students and their parents, the steady spike in tuition prices in recent decades has been not only troubling but mysterious: why on earth is tuition inflation double the…
An article in The Economist argues that a little auction theory might solve some of the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) current LIBOR problems: Some of LIBOR’s failures also have echoes…
In our latest podcast, “What Do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have in Common?” we talked about America’s financial literacy problem, a topic we’ve written about before. In the podcast, two…
Annamaria Lusardi, one of the leading academic lights of financial literacy, has begun a new Financial Literacy Center “to develop and test innovative programs to improve financial literacy and promote…