Archive for July 7th, 2009

CNBC’s Dennis Kneale Continues His Battle With The Blogs

Dennis Kneale was out for the bloggers again this evening and I must admit I’m beginning to move to his side. This is becoming a case of the blogosphere making a collective ass of itself. If you’re not familiar with the story here are the Cliff Notes. Kneale is a CNBC talking head and has his […]

Japan’s Slide Continues

It’s more of the same old news for Japan. The global economy continues to savage the country. From Market Watch: Japanese data sets released Wednesday suggested the global recession continues to take a toll, showing up in both lagging and leading indicators. Japan’s current-account surplus slipped 34.2% in May from that month last year, as […]

Chinese President Begs Off G8 Meeting To Attent To Riots At Home

I guess things are as bad or worse in China’s Xinjiang province as the news reports indicate. Fox is reporting that the Chinese President has bailed out of the G8 meeting to attend to the crisis: Chinese President Hu Jintao cut short his stay in Italy and cancelled his attendance at this week’s Group of […]

The Boston Fed Says We Don’t Understand Foreclosures

If you’ve read it once, you’ve read it a thousand times. It’s the meme that it’s in the best interest of banks to modify loans and reduce principal since they will lose as much or more through the foreclosure process. Well, some fellows from the Boston Fed decided to see if that was indeed true, […]

Tax Increases: Accepting The Inevitable

In the New York Times today, David Leonhardt announced the formation of “Club Wagner.” It’s named after Adolf Wagner who postulated that as societies prospered taxes would increase due to a demand for more government services. Members of the club are those who favor increasing taxes in the U.S. Maybe I should rephrase that last […]

A Better Way To Retrain Workers

Megan McArdle has perhaps one of the best blog posts I’ve read in a long time. She actually comes up with a smart, viable suggestion for retraining workers. But given my own experience, it strikes me that we might do better by targeting employment–offering employers a subsidy for hiring displaced workers into a job that […]

Boone Pickens Retreats On Wind Power

Remember Boone Pickens plans to cover the United States with windmills and lead all of us into the brave new world of renewable energy? Well, never mind. From Fox: Boone Pickens no longer plans to build the world’s largest wind farm, a spokesman for the Texas billionaire told the Dallas Morning News. Pickens had already […]