Dow 30
Are Yesterday's Election Results Boosting the Market?
Apparently there’s a rumor making the rounds in some corners of Wall Street that yesterday’s election results are driving today’s stock market rally—the theory being that the results are a blow to Obama’s agenda, and stopping Obama is good for the market. (I just got a call from a producer at CNBC asking me what I thought about this). The reasons why this theory is utterly ludicrous are almost too numerous to catalogue, but let me give it a quick shot: READ MORE >>
Gourmet and the Bottom of the Magazine Market
Dan Gross is onto something with his most recent Slate column: READ MORE >>
Sachs Appeal
With Gm Out, Who Gets A Spot In The Dow... And How?
Today, General Motors (GM) filed for bankruptcy. As a result, starting on June 8, it will no longer be included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), the market index calculated from the stock prices of 30 of the largest, most widely held companies in the United States. GM's removal will mark the end of an impressive 83-year stretch in the DJIA. And it won't be exiting alone: Citigroup will also be kicked out of the index the same day. Replacing the two once-behemoths will be The READ MORE >>
Wasting Away in Hooverville
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression By Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 464 pp., $26.95) Herbert Hoover By William E. Leuchtenburg (Times Books, 208 pp., $22) Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America By Adam Cohen (Penguin Press, 372 pp., $29.95) READ MORE >>
Hype And Fear In The News
David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his innovative coverage of our tax system, retired this year as a investigative reporter for The New York Times. He is the author of Free Lunch: How The Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expenses (and Stick You with the Bill). Now that the House has rejected the $700 billion bailout, what we have to fear is not fear itself, but fear-mongering--particularly by our leading news organizations. READ MORE >>
No Pain, No Gain
Last fall, Williams Communications Group (WCG) looked like as good a bankruptcy candidate as any. The firm was supposed to make money by selling access to its 33,000-mile fiber-optic network to phone companies and Internet service providers. But a glut of fiber-optic cable had driven prices for that service down dramatically, while communications traffic was barely increasing. That left WCG's revenues at only a fraction of what had been expected when all its cable had been laid. READ MORE >>
The End of the Reagan Boom
What’s going on here? Only a year ago, the economy was racing along at the fastest clip in more than 30 years. Personal income was up, inflation was down, and to many Americans, if seemed positively churlish to deny that President Reagan had succeeded in "laying the foundations for a decade of supply-side growth." READ MORE >>
