Financial Literacy Begins at Home
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 —…
Until recently, Delaware was almost universally agreed to be the best place for companies to incorporate. Now, with Elon Musk leading a corporate stampede out of the First State, we…
They’ve long been associated with crime and blight. Now, the investors are moving in. Zachary Crockett follows the trail.
Whaling was, in the words of one scholar, “early capitalism unleashed on the high seas.” How did the U.S. come to dominate the whale market? Why did whale hunting die…
Flying in the U.S. is still exceptionally safe, but the system relies on outdated tech and is under tremendous strain. Six experts tell us how it got this way and…
What does it take to “play 3D chess at 250 miles an hour”? And how far will $12.5 billion of “Big, Beautiful” funding go toward modernizing the F.A.A.? (Part two…
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 —…
Easy credit also bad for bankruptcies. Gathering data on late adopters. (Earlier) Should people in poor health be allowed to donate organs? (Related)…
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?…
These days, many Americans — including Mike Bloomberg and Chuck Schumer — fear the answer to that question will soon be “no,” if it isn’t already; London is poised to…
Not long ago, I wrote about the sad state of financial literacy in the U.S., and how some people, like Annamaria Lusardi of Dartmouth, are proposing widespread education to fix…
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;…
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…
…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…
…was a command economy devoted to an all-out war effort. William Tecumseh Sherman famously stated, “War is hell.” We should add the phrase, “even when financed by large budget deficits.”…
In early December, I spoke at a Yale Law School breakfast on the current financial crisis — focusing on Robert Shiller‘s book, The Subprime Solution. (Several of my earlier posts…
My former student Sean Harper has put together a nifty little web site, truecostofcredit.com, that allows you to see how much merchants are charged when you use your credit card….
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,…
Aaron Zelinsky is a Yale law school student with a knack for coming up with interesting ideas. Last year, I blogged about his proposal for fighting steroid use in sports…
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…
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…
There’s a strange view out there that with unemployment above ten percent, and inflation subdued, the Fed should be thinking about raising interest rates.Yesterday Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser attempted…
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…
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…
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…
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…
…long term adverse effect on government finances. Equally deleterious to economic health is the recent vogue of cutting interest rates to near zero and holding them there for a sustained…
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…
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…
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…