Oct 15 Inner Workings at the NewsHour, or The Tale of a Keynes Rap Video Paul Solman: Caveat lector: What follows may be more than you want to know. That said, a blog post about us and TV talk show booking practices, The Perils of a Talking Head, appeared yesterday. I thought it might… Continue reading
Oct 14 Can We Identify Bills that Led to Deregulation Over the Past 30 Years? Question: I’m amazed that we have not seen an historical listing of the series of federal bills from Reagan’s administration, as well as Clinton’s and Bush II, that would identify a series of “deregulating” events that contributed to the current… Continue reading
Oct 13 What Is a Jobless Recovery? Question: You have talked about a jobless recovery. What does it mean? Paul Solman: Boy, have we ever! Indeed, we did a whole series on the so-called “jobless recovery” back in 2003, one of whose stories was our… Continue reading
Oct 09 Why Is the Price of Gold So High? Question: Why is the price of gold at a record high? And how does that affect the dollar? Paul Solman: Gold is denominated in dollars. So if gold goes up, it means the dollar has gone down, because it takes… Continue reading
Oct 08 Will the New G-20 Eclipse the United Nations? Question: Your exuberance the other day in discussing the addition of several countries to the G-8 — now G-20 — led me to speculate whether the new G-20 could, in a real sense, eclipse the United Nations. Can the… Continue reading
Oct 07 How Does Global Financial Regulation Affect the Doha Round? Question: World leaders at the G-20 Summit issued plans for reregulating the financial industry to help solve the economic crisis. Yet, bizarrely those same leaders will push for completion of the current WTO negotiations… Continue reading
Oct 06 Is the High Jobless Rate Due to the Return of Discouraged Workers to the Pool? Question: Is there any [truth to the] idea that the jobless rate might have increased due to return of discouraged workers to the pool vs actual lost jobs? Paul Solman: None. Not in the data. “Discouraged workers” come in… Continue reading
Oct 02 More Grim News in the Sept. Jobs Numbers Paul Solman: Today’s unemployment data are grim. I began to write “startlingly grim” but then realized that, for those of us on-the-record pessimists with regard to green shoots and recovery, the numbers aren’t startling at all. Having been on the… Continue reading
Oct 01 Portrait of B of A’s Ken Lewis, Soon to Be Retired Editor’s note: You may remember artist Geoffrey Raymond from our Lehman Brothers story last month. Raymond was painting portraits of the wizards of Wall Street even before the market went into a tailspin. After the crash, he started… Continue reading
Sep 28 Back Home From Pittsburgh (and the G-20) Paul Solman: Meetings like the G-20 can be astonishingly ungratifying to cover. Top officials are, for the most part, intent on talking to one another and impossible to buttonhole. Legions of subalterns try to protect their bosses (and bosses’ bosses,… Continue reading