Friday

Did you hear the good news?  The Los Angeles Lakers played a fantastic first half of their opening pre-season game!  Anthony Davis, their new power forward, scored 22 points, and future Hall of Famer Lebron James added 15 himself.  While this first half was an encouraging 24 minutes of basketball, it doesn’t count toward the season’s tally, so plans for a championship

Our economy is currently in the middle of its longest economic expansion ever.  Sometimes it’s tough to imagine the Great Recession ended over a decade ago or that the first recession of this century started over 18 years ago.  During both downturns, output was in steep decline and firms were hemorrhaging jobs by the hundreds of thousands each week (e.g., in March 2009, the net

In 1970 the United States issued a block of four stamps (pictured above).  Note that regular postage costs $0.06 then. These stamps were intended to call attention to the importance of four ecological issues and the threats each faced.

The Treasury yield curve (a graphical representation of Treasury bond yields plotted along an X-axis defined by maturity) has continued making headlines this week.  It has spent a substantial amount of the period “inverted,” to wit, the two-year full faith and credit notes are paying more than ten-year Treasury bonds.  Typically, this is seen as a harbinger of a looming re

Insensitivity is on the rise.  It’s taking the world by storm.

A week ago today Southern California was hit with the largest earthquake since 1999.  Just a day earlier, the region shook as a magnitude 6.4 pre-shock rattled through before the main event which was 11 times stronger.  Meanwhile, my buddy John in New Orleans spent his Wednesday of this week moving sand in an attempt to minimize potential flood damage from Tropical Storm (and potentia

Disruptor is an aging buzz word in the American lexicon.  For years we’ve been hearing about disruptive technology (sometimes it only disrupts one’s inner tranquility when it doesn’t work).