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Host Katherine Lanpher talks with TIME business and economics reporters to sort through the headlines, forecasts, news and numbers that will help you weather these challenging times.
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Commentary on the economy, the markets, and business
It's been too long since I posted a music video. No Belgians this time, just some Minneapolis boys singing a Minneapolis song:
The unemployment rate is down to 10%. Payroll employment, a more reliable month-to-month indicator, was "essentially unchanged." That's Bureau of Labor Statistics lingo for 11,000 fewer jobs than the month before. So the number is still negative, but after 21 straight months of 100,000+ job losses, it's pretty encouraging news.
Now for the usual caveats. These numbers are subject to revision. Last month's payroll job loss number of -190,000 has been revised down to -111,000. September's nasty -263,000, which had me wondering if the job market had started getting worse again, has been revised down to -139,000. So this month's good news could be revised upward into really good news or downward into disappointment. The trend is looking pretty good but, as Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics writes, "There is no doubt the underlying trend in payrolls is improving, but this looks a bit too fast."
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Back in February, my employer, Time Warner, announced the completion of its spinoff of Time Warner Cable, the country's second-biggest cable system operator. Said Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes at the time:
We're confident that this separation will benefit Time Warner and Time Warner Cable stockholders. Both companies will be better positioned to compete, with capital structures more suited to their respective needs as well as greater operational, financial and strategic flexibility. At the remaining Time Warner businesses, we'll stay focused on what we do best—creating, packaging and distributing our branded, high-quality content.
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For the fifth week in a row, the number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits has dropped, according to the Labor Department. The number of initial claims came in at 457,000 for the week ending Nov. 28. That's the lowest level since September 2008. (The data are seasonally adjusted, which tries to account for differences such as Thanksgiving having been on Thursday.)
The four-week average of new claims—intended to smooth out distortions from one-time events like bad weather—also fell, to 481,250, its lowest point in 13 months.
So that's good news on one front: employers seem to be firing less. Of course, hiring is a different matter.
Sorry for the lack of posting. Been on the move, and been sleepy. I'm currently sitting in a hotel room in downtown LA, getting ready for a Drucker Business Forum chat with Kai Ryssdal and Paul Zak about rational/irrational markets and then a radio interview on KPCC's AirTalk with Larry Mantle. And while we're on the self-aggrandizement front, here's some thrilling video from the discussion I did with Bruce Bartlett, Bob Samuelson and others a few weeks back:
Back in New York, and back to more frequent blogging, tomorrow (or maybe this afternoon, depending how long I'm sitting around at LAX).
Philip Coggan, a.k.a. The Economist's Buttonwood columnist, steers me to
a strange piece in the Financial Times today which attacks (without naming) Justin Fox's book The Myth of the Rational Market.
The column is basically a rehash of a blog post by Gene Fama, which I addressed here a couple of weeks ago. And it doesn't exactly attack my book:
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My new column is online and in the issue of TIME with the crying baby on the cover.
While we're on the topic of the cover, I should mention that Andy Serwer's cover story on The Decade From Hell is not purely an exercise in looking through the rearview mirror. Well, actually, it is mostly an exercise in looking through the rearview mirror, but I also have a distinct memory of Andy, at some point in 2001 or 2002 (it couldn't have been 2000, when he was still bullish), going on one of his trademark rants about what a crummy decade the 2000s were going to be. "It's the '70s all over again," he said. Pollyanna that I am, I doubted him. And he was wrong: It wasn't the '70s all over again. It was worse.
So when Andy says the next decade is going to be better, as he does in his essay, I believe him. Although of course Nassim Taleb would say I'm a fool for doing so.
This is the story, via Chris Matyszczyk, of how Ikea used Facebook to promote a new store in Malmö, Sweden:
It's this year's gingerbread "house," built in the days after Thanksgiving by Curious Capitalist Jr., his maternal grandparents and his mother (I had nothing to do with it). Another view:
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