Earn What You Spend

Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category

Weekend Reading, 5/3

Gretchen Morgenson takes us through the importance of understanding the fine print of student loans.  (This is something I wrote about in my post about the burden of college debt.)
The importance of networking is magnified in a recession.  As an aside, the phrase ‘networking’ has always held a slightly negative connotation for me - I believe [...]

Written by William

May 3rd, 2009 at 2:04 pm

Posted in Economy

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Unemployment Rate Data Analysis

Google just released an excellent way to analyze the unemployment data from the BLS:
Source: Google
It allows you to quickly do comparisons of both states and cities, which is something I’ve previously been unable to do quickly.  It’s shows you just how frighteningly high the unemployment is in some regions. 
[Hat tip: Alex Tabarrok]

Written by William

April 30th, 2009 at 3:02 pm

Posted in Economy

Slate Visualizes Job Losses

[Via Paul Kedrosky]
This is a pretty amazing visualization - I’m always a sucker for anything that makes data come alive.  Slate takes the past couple years of employment data from the Labor department and visualizes it in this heatmap.  Watching the country change from blue to red is rather frightening. 

Written by William

April 16th, 2009 at 3:15 pm

Posted in Economy

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The job losses of the Great Recession

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the unemployment rate has now hit 8.5% -  so far in this recession the economy has shed over 5.1 million jobs.  We all have friends, family and colleagues who are affected by these job losses.  It’s an incredibly tough thing to watch. 
The standard saying is that [...]

Written by William

April 7th, 2009 at 11:07 am

Posted in Economy

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CO2 as the moral equivalent of financial derivatives

Tonight at the New York Public Library I attended a discussion between award-winning columnist and author Thomas Friedman and Nandan Nilekani, Co-Chairman and one of the founders of Infosys Technologies, Ltd.  These are two immensely interesting and well-spoken men, so I jumped at the opportunity to hear them live.
The discussion at first centered on well-known facts: the [...]

Written by William

March 23rd, 2009 at 10:25 pm

Geithner’s Plan Coming Today

Stay close to your computer / tv screen this morning, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner is to start his briefing this morning at 8:45 EST on his plan to attack the current economic crisis.  In today’s Wall Street Journal, Geithner begins to give out some of the details of this much-anticipated plan. 
What I find [...]

Written by William

March 23rd, 2009 at 8:38 am

Posted in Economy

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