The internet has destroyed many business models. Just look at Circuit City, Borders, and travel agents. But one area where we haven’t seen much impact is with real estate agents. Sure, you’ll look online for hours on end for different houses and whatnot, but when it comes time to start looking at them in the [...]

We can always debate how useful economists might be, or how legitimate their field of study is. But it should be obvious to you by now there is significant value in understanding things such as GDP, employment, government stimulus, and interest rates. This kind of knowledge influences everything from how you save to who you’re [...]

In the continuing fallout from the Reinhart-Rogoff scandal on debt-to-GDP levels, people continue to weigh in on the usefulness of economists. This time it’s a professor at Harvard asking “What Use Are Economists?” There is one other thing that the public should know about economists: It is cleverness, not wisdom, that advances academic economists’ careers. [...]

That whole concept of “buy now, pay later” never made much sense from a phrasing perspective. If you haven’t paid for it yet, you haven’t bought it. In the strictest sense that’s really just a seller giving you a loan. “Sign and drive”, now that makes more sense. These arrangements aren’t always the best deals [...]

Chances are you didn’t go to college in a big city. Many of us probably went to schools in either smaller towns or at least not bustling metropolises. But if after graduation you didn’t move to a major city to find a job, you probably considered it. Big cities have lots of job opportunities and [...]

Thanks to the NY Federal Reserve we get access to all kinds of data about the credit and borrowing situation of ourselves and our fellow citizens. Here’s an update on where we stand.   Total Consumer Debt & Composition This chart shows what our consumer debt situation actually looks like. Obviously, mortgages make up the [...]

The internet age is filled with all kinds of innovations and world changing technologies. It’s also filled with glorious time wasters that take something like a movie you know and love, and recap it in a 60 second black and white animation with little talking. This is the latter.

We talk a lot about the standard fare of economic data on this site; employment data always steals the show but there are many other data points with great importance. And then there are even more obscure economic reports that provide much more detail than the average user would really care to have. On another [...]