This post is going to be a bit different than most. I don’t normally rant about trivial things but sometimes someone strikes that one nerve at the right time of the right day. Last week I got an email from someone telling me I had won an award for one of the best 30 finance [...]

The world’s economic leaders have finished up their G20 summit in which they together decided to do different things for their economies.  Europe will cut spending, while the US will increase spending.  Of course the US will only keep spending if the public supports such a measure.  Mounting pressure due to negative attitudes towards government [...]

My favorite thing to do is take something that has little to do with money and use it to explain elements of economics and finance. And of course the best way to get your attention is to relate it something that’s on a lot of people’s minds. Inspired by the World Cup, I’ve decided to [...]

It feels like not too long ago that Christmas always felt like it was 366 days away. No matter what, it was never going to get here. I looked forward to going to the beach with my family every summer, and that week always felt like 2 days. I watched Star Wars every time it [...]

Do you think like an economist? If you follow this blog you probably do, or are at least starting to. Economists are often chided for talking as if humans are rational. We clearly aren’t rational at all. We make decisions all the time that are not rational decisions. For example, the night I wrote this [...]

You’ve probably seen this before: A company announces some kind of bad news and the stock price tanks. This happened to CVS few days ago when Walgreens announced they were ending a partnership with CVS. The price of CVS stock dropped something like 10%. That was big news and it triggered a number of people [...]

In Obama’s $700 billion stimulus from 2009 there was an item in there designed to increase demand for housing, the underlying cause of the reason you’re unemployed, broke, or simply pissed your nest egg dropped to 50% of its value. Buyers of homes could get as much as $8000 in tax credits for making a [...]

Remember that Credit CARD Act passed last year? It limited the fees that credit card companies could charge and introduced dozens of other reforms designed to protect the consumer from being taken advantage of by the big, bad, banks. As it turns out, there are plenty of loopholes, the first and most obvious was that [...]