May 25 Watch China Experts Assess Next Steps for U.S. Policy Toward Beijing As the U.S. looks to relieve tensions with China in a series of high-level talks, Ray Suarez gets two points of view on the economic and foreign policy relationships between the two countries. Continue watching
Dec 16 Making Sen$e of 2010: Conventional Wisdoms That May Be Wrong By Carolyn O'Hara As the end of a tumultuous economic year approaches, the PBS NewsHour asked several economists and financial experts to look ahead to 2010 and answer one question: What is the economic conventional wisdom with which you most disagree?… Continue reading
Dec 15 Watch How Big is Too Big to Fail? Paul Solman talks to economist George Schultz about the merging of large, national banks and how that could impact the idea that some companies are too big to fail. Continue watching
Jun 29 Guest Host: Robert Frank as the Economic Naturalist Paul Solman: As many NewsHour viewers and Business Desk readers know, Cornell’s Bob Frank is a great favorite of ours. I’ll spare you the usual economiums (encomia?) and links: if you’re intent on “drilling down,” just Google our names… Continue reading
Jun 19 Making Sen$e 2.0 Attention all teachers, viewers, readers, skimmers, and occasional passersby: The second edition of our Economics-for-Everyone Web site, Making Sen$e, is now up and running. Please visit and please, please respond with suggestions as to what you’d like to… Continue reading
May 27 A Final Thought on the Andrews-McArdle Affair Paul Solman: The blizzard of response to the Andrews/McArdle affair has thinned to a flurry, but flakes keep coming, affording me an opportunity to respond to the persistent inclemency and continue the multi-logue, a first for this page. Continue reading
May 08 Making Sen$e of Business, Finance, and Economics No more posts for today or the weekend as we debut (drum roll here, even trumpets, perhaps, or maybe a French overture)…our new Making Sen$e Web site, made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,… Continue reading
Apr 30 Why Is the Gold Standard a Bad Idea? Question: Why is the gold standard such a bad idea? I know it is a discredited system, but having never studied economics, I don’t understand why. Right now, is our money just some arbitrary amount issued by the Federal Reserve?… Continue reading
Apr 20 How Should We Interpret the String of Positive Earnings Reports from U.S. Banks? Question: After three major banks – Citigroup, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs – announced better-than-expected earnings last week, Bank of America announced more than $4 billion in first-quarter profits today. How should we interpret this string of good earnings reports?… Continue reading
Feb 20 Why Can’t We Make Better Economic Predictions? Question/Comment: Why isn’t economics more of a science? I’ve seen pundits on TV say the Great Lesson of the Great Depression is to have jobs programs and get people back to work, but other pundits say the Depression would’ve been… Continue reading