newyorker.com - 3/9/2009
—
In tough times, businesses will do nearly anything to get new customers--look at the big markdowns at retailers and the cheap financing at auto dealerships. But there is an exception to the rule: these days, credit-card companies are trying to get rid of customers. They’re shutting down ...
James Surowiecki: Not Home Yet
newyorker.com 8/3/2009 — Last week, when the Obama Administration sat down in Washington with the country’s biggest mortgage servicers, it was sending a clear message: it’s time for banks to be more aggressive in modifying the mortgages of troubled borrowers. But ...
James Surowiecki: How banks got big.
newyorker.com 5/4/2009 — Amid the blizzard of economic data that the government puts out every week, last Tuesday’s report analyzing G.D.P. industry by industry got little notice. But it contained one very interesting piece of data: in 2008, for the first time in ...
James Surowiecki: On how we created the food crisis.
newyorker.com 11/17/2008 — This spring, disaster loomed in the global food market. Precipitous increases in the prices of staples like rice (up more than a hundred and fifty per cent in a few months) and maize provoked food riots, toppled governments, and threatened the lives ...
James Surowiecki: Why Banks Stay Big
newyorker.com 10/26/2009 — Before the financial crisis, the banking industry was too concentrated and clubby. And now? It’s even more so. In the midst of the crisis, the country’s four biggest banks—Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells ...
James Surowiecki: The aims of the Geithner plan.
newyorker.com 3/30/2009 — Not long ago, many of America’s biggest banks made terrible bets on overpriced real estate and suffered huge losses. While the banks insisted that they were fundamentally healthy, economists and politicians declared many of them to be insolvent. ...
James Surowiecki: Wages, productivity, and the unemployment crisis.
newyorker.com 2/23/2009 — This is the Age of the Incredible Shrinking Everything. Home prices, the stock market, G.D.P., corporate profits, employment: they’re all a fraction of what they once were. Yet amid this carnage there is one thing that, surprisingly, has ...
James Surowiecki: Why the market couldn't check its fall.
newyorker.com 10/27/2008 — Death by a thousand cuts.” “Fire-sale liquidation.” “A vortex of selling.” No matter how people described the market collapse that hit a month ago, the message was the same: it felt like there was nowhere to go but down, ...
James Surowiecki: Europe's stimulus aversion.
newyorker.com 3/23/2009 — In American politics, “Europe” is usually a code word for “big government.” So in the midst of a global recession, with the U.S. and China shelling out trillions in fiscal stimulus, you might expect that European governments ...
House of Cards
washingtonindependent.com 1/25/2009 — Why Analysts Fear $1 Trillion Credit Card Market Could Be Next Crash
James Surowiecki: When fraudsters go bust.
newyorker.com 1/5/2009 — Along with slashed payrolls, rising foreclosures, and plummeting stock prices, 2008 brought another unwelcome development: a surge in bank robberies, which were up more than fifty per cent in New York. This wasn’t shocking: we typically expect ...
Follow WallStreetBlips on Twitter
