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Posts Tagged ‘recession’

When Times Get Tough, the Tough Get Tattoos and Tequila

We’ve posted several times about interesting odd pairs and strange promotional gimmicks. Now hotels, facing persistently low occupancy rates, are getting in on the act. The Hotel Erwin in Venice Beach now offers a package with a new tattoo and a bottle of tequila (to numb the pain).



The Darwin Awards of Finance

Hedgeable.com is holding a contest to find the American investor who lost the most during the recession, reports The Economist; they want the “financial world’s equivalent of Paris Hilton” (named worst actress at this year’s Golden Raspberries).



Recession Kids

We recently blogged about how recessions might affect the mentality of people growing up in them. American Public Media’s Marketplace recently hosted a “Small Town Hall,” where kids were asked questions like “Should kids be allowed to have credit cards?” and “Has the recession changed your dreams?”



Vendor Power

The Internets Celebrities (Dallas Penn and Rafi Kammade) appeared on our blog a while back with their video about check-cashing establishments vs. commercial banks. They’re back with another (NSFW) video, “Vend Diagram,” in which they question how the recession has affected New York’s street vendors.



The Recession Mentality

If you’re wondering how the recession is affecting today’s young adults, a new paper (abstract only) by Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo may have the answer.



When Is a House Worth Less Than a Car?

In Detroit, the average price of home sales is less than what you’d pay for a good used car. UCLA economics professor Matthew Kahn points out that you can buy 100 Detroit homes for the price of one house in Westwood in L.A.



Feeling Better Lately?

It seems the recession may be good for your health. A new paper by Stephen Bezruchka in the Canadian Medical Association Journal confirms that economic recessions in the 20th century actually led to declines in mortality.



Shocking Unemployment Numbers

I don’t usually write about macro things. But a journalist asked me about the duration of unemployment, and I checked out how this recession compares to previous ones.



Resetting America: A Q&A With Author Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen sees the economic recession as a one-time opportunity for America to “get back on track.” In his new book, Reset, he explains how he thinks Americans can use the crisis to “reset” and reinvent old systems and ideas and “focus more on the things that make us authentically happy.”



Scaling the Heights of Corporate Greed: Chafkin and Lo on Risk

Andrew W. Lo, who teaches at M.I.T. and is director of its Laboratory for Financial Engineering, has contributed to this blog before. Here he is joined by co-author Jeremiah H. Chafkin, president of AlphaSimplex Group (where Lo also serves as chairman and chief scientific officer) for a guest post about the best (and worst) ways to manage risk.



What Does This Sad Story Say to You?

In today’s Washington Post, there’s an incredibly affecting long article about a down-and-out family in Indiana. It’s called “Nowhere to Go But Down.” Husband and wife have both lost their jobs; there’s a teenage son and a very young daughter, and it looks like they’re all going to have to move back to Michigan to live in the basement of the wife’s mother. I urge you all to read it, and to look at the photo gallery too.



Detroit Produce City?

Detroit is practically a giant food desert, with no produce-carrying grocery chains left and its citizens resorting to local raccoon and pheasant meat. According to Mark Dowie in Guernica, that makes Detroit a prime candidate for the world’s first “100 percent food-self-sufficient city.”





Reading the Employment Report: Focus on Hours, Not Heads

The latest employment numbers are out, and they are dreadful. Those commentators who saw “green shoots” out there had been focusing on the fact that in May, the economy “only” shed 322,000 jobs, which is good news when compared with the fact that the economy had been losing over 600,000 jobs per month in January, February, and March. Squint hard enough at the black line in my chart, and you can see why many were hopeful that job losses were slowing down.



When Boring = Great

John Lorinc profiles Mark Carney, the governor of the Central Bank of Canada. While the rest of the developing world’s banks are on life support, Lorinc writes that Canada’s financial system “has sailed through this crisis with its international reputation almost unscathed.” Carney is also a vocal advocate for increased regulation of the financial sector and is one of the primary architects of the G20’s regulatory reforms.



Another Upside to the Down Economy

Good news: people who still have jobs are having a much easier time driving to work. Traffic congestion is down as much as 30 percent in 99 of the country’s 100 largest metro areas. In Washington, D.C., famous for gridlock of all kinds, traffic has fallen 24 percent during rush hour. San Francisco saw travel times fall 12 percent this . . .




Contest: The Request Line Is Open

Now even better, the original song-a-day man, Jonathan Mann, has agreed to take a request: he’ll write a song about whatever you want. Leave your suggestions below. It doesn’t have to be about the recession — just make it clever, entertaining, wise, witty, etc. Jonathan (maybe with our input) will pick the best suggestion — and the winning suggester will get a piece of Freakonomics schwag. And, of course, a song. We will, of course, post the song here once it’s recorded.
Good luck.





The "We're In The Money" Blues

Listeners of “The Numbers” segment on NPR’s Marketplace, a daily recap of the stock market’s action, thought its upbeat version of “We’re in the Money” as background music is inappropriate for the times.



Let's Avoid Other New Deal Policy Blunders

In the third and final installment of articles comparing today’s economic situation to the Great Depression, economic historian Price Fishback implores policy makers to avoid the mistakes that were made in the Great Depression. His two prior posts in
the series are here and here.



The Financial Meltdown Now and Then

In the first installment of a three-part series, economic historian Price Fishback showed just how different the basic macroeconomic facts are in the current financial situation versus during the Great Depression.
In the second of three blog posts, Fishback turns to a discussion of the recent financial meltdown compared to the one that accompanied the Great Depression. For everyone still scratching their heads about what happened to the financial sector this fall, Fishback offers one of the clearest descriptions I’ve seen yet. He then discusses the similarities and differences of the financial collapse that began in 1929.



This Is Not Another Great Depression

Few people in the world know more about the Great Depression than economic historian Price Fishback, which is why whenever he offers an opinion on the subject, I always listen carefully. Back in the fall, Fishback wrote two outstanding posts here at the Freakonomics blog, one on what the New Deal tells us about the likely success of the stimulus . . .



FREAK Shots: Death and Foreclosure

A blog reader named Lee emailed us a photo he took on Highway 86 in Imperial, California. “It made me wonder if [the economy] is really that bad that even dead people will lose their resting places,” he writes. “What will they do? Evict the dead?” Photo: Lee We called Victor Carrillo, the supervisor for Imperial County listed on the . . .



Masters of the Silver Lining

I like hunting for silver linings as much as the next guy. But there is one group of people who are so good at finding them that I can only dream of matching their prowess. I am talking, of course, about C.E.O.’s. It is earnings season and we are of course in the grip of a recession, so you would . . .





Tent City Portraits

Tent cities have been cropping up across the country and around the world. The Times‘ Jim Wilson recently put together this series of photos of tent city life outside Fresno, California. (NOTE: This post originally linked to a different set of photos which the photographer has since requested be removed.) [%comments]