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Mall rats don’t foster prosperity
feature Our promotion of consumption “as the key to health and wealth” has whittled the savings rate from an average of 9.6 percent in the 1970s to 3.3 percent in the 2000s, said Caroline Baum at Bloomberg.com.
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Viewpoint: Felix Salmon
feature From Reuters.com: “In a way it’s reassuring that America’s billionaires are still so civic-minded that they buy laws and political parties....
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Viewpoint: Kevin Carey
feature From The New Republic: “Everyone currently in the four-year higher-education business has a host of strong incentives to raise prices...
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Viewpoint: Geoff Colvin
feature From Fortune: “Wall Street has to change in painful ways. The major firms, gloriously profitable just a few years ago, are not earning their cost of capital. They’re failing...
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A double standard on default
feature While corporations get praised for staging strategic defaults, homeowners are painted as “dishonorable deadbeats” if they walk away from their mortgages, said James Surowiecki at The New Yorker.
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Wal-Mart’s art of shame
feature Several paintings in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art strike me as “especially pointed commentaries” on the retailer’s baleful effect on our country and its economy, said Jeffrey Goldberg at Bloomberg.com.
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Issue of the week: How Twitter fueled a market swoon
feature A fake report posted by hackers on the Associated Press Twitter feed caused the S&P 500 to drop 0.9 percent.
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Issue of the week: A spreadsheet error’s aftermath
feature In 2010, two Harvard economists made what many thought was an airtight case for government austerity.
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Issue of the week: Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft legacy
feature When the CEO of Microsoft announced that he would retire within the year, “the company’s stock surged.”
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Issue of the week: Does the deficit really matter?
feature Are lawmakers exaggerating in their portrayal of the deficit and the national debt as apocalyptic threats?
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Issue of the week: Twitter’s public stock offering
feature As Twitter prepares for its initial public offering, “its books aren’t pretty.”
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A retail bully gets its comeuppance
feature Abercrombie & Fitch is “a schoolyard bully”
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Issue of the week: The corporate costs of surveillance
feature When your firm hosts personal data for millions of people, “privacy is a big selling point.”
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Issue of the week: The rise of a part-time economy
feature The economy has created new jobs for the 34th month in a row, but most of them are low-paid and part-time.
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