Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
©Joe Waldron Save money into my pension? I’d rather blow it on a holiday. This is the typical response of a millennial — marketing shorthand for a 20-something — when you ask them about financial planning. More On this story On this topic IN Personal Finance For the generation that grew up in the Noughties,…
Yesterday, I had the rare opportunity to quiz four of the smartest economists who have ever served in government – Ben Bernanke, Michael Boskin, Joseph Stiglitz and Maurice Obstfeld – on the five things that puzzle me about today’s economy. The panel was put together by David Wessel of the Hutchins Center at Brookings as…
Capitalism has generated massive wealth for some, but it’s devastated the planet and has failed to improve human well-being at scale. Species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 times faster than that of the natural rate over the previous 65 million years (see Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School). Since 2000, 6…
Workers trying to leave Levi’s Stadium after Super Bowl 50. Gabriel Thompson This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. On Super Bowl Sunday, a few minutes before 7 a.m., I park in a crowded dirt lot behind Avaya Stadium, home to the San Jose Earthquakes soccer team. I’m carrying…
Among the takeaways from Timothy Geithner’s 2014 memoir “Stress Test” is his contention that the financial system is safer and more stable today. And central to that improvement are the stiffer capital requirements, buffers of liquid assets for financial institutions so they can absorb their own losses. With stronger capital standards, banks must “hold more…
“Push button. Get Mortgage.” That’s the tagline of Quicken Loans’ new product, Rocket Mortgage. The company introduced Rocket Mortgage to the massive television audience watching Super Bowl 50 in a one-minute commercial. The ad describes a simple push button app that allows people to get mortgages on their phones, which would lead to a “tidal…
Seven years after the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, the world economy continued to stumble in 2015. According to the United Nations’ report World Economic Situation and Prospects 2016, the average growth rate in developed economies has declined by more than 54% since the crisis. An estimated 44 million people are unemployed in developed…
Our nation has problems, and your nation has problems, but be thankful you don’t live in Venezuela, which is truly one of the most fucked places on earth. Sure, Syria has a horrific war and plenty of nations around the world have populations that are destitute and disease-ridden. But the thing that really hurts is…
In corporate America, the most persistent refuge of outright charlatanism is “branding.” The only thing more offensive to honesty than a “rebranding” campaign is a breathless feature story about a rebranding campaign. What do we have in Wired today… ah, it’s a breathless feature story about a rebranding campaign! “The Inside Story of Uber’s Radical…
Photo Gregory Anderson’s lawsuit provides a peek inside Yahoo’s controversial quarterly performance review system. Credit Laura McDermott for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — One of Marissa Mayer’s signature policies as chief executive of Yahoo has been the quarterly performance review, in which every employee at the company is ranked on a scale of…