Okay, so I totally missed this. Here's Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, talking to the New York Post's Keith Kelly a little over a week ago:

Moore pointed to the recent Time cover story, "How Wall Street Sold Out America," which was written by Fortune magazine's top editor, Andy Serwer, and noted economic and Fortune columnist Allan Sloan.

That kind of cross-magazine sharing on the editorial side was virtually unheard of in the past, and marked the first time that a managing editor of one magazine contributed and co-wrote a cover story on another title.

Moore also dropped some broad hints that the Fortune-Time experiment could be a blueprint for the future.

"Time was happy - it got two great writers for its cover. Who was unhappy? Maybe Time's five business writers, but they got to blog on the topic," said Moore.

Gee, I think that's a reference to Barbara and me--all five of us. And we did get to blog on the topic. I for one was more than happy with the arrangement, and I really liked Andy and Allan's story. But I am somewhat mystified that Ann keeps bringing up the Serwer/Sloan article and never mentions the one I wrote in return for Fortune a couple weeks later. The only possible explanation: She reads TIME religiously, but never quite gets around to Fortune.

With the GDP numbers out today we now have all the inputs needed to figure out who's going to win the presidential election. At least, we have all the inputs needed to run the Fair Model, Yale economist Ray Fair's GDP- and inflation-based formula for predicting whether the incumbent party holds onto the White House or not. Plug in real annual GDP growth of 1.1% in the first three quarters of the election year, average inflation (as measured by the GDP deflator, not CPI) of 2.9% over the first 15 quarters of the current presidential term, and four quarters of 3.2%+ GDP growth during the current term and you get ...

... a 50.25% to 49.75% Obama popular-vote victory (the Fair Model has no truck with third-party candidates or the electoral college or any of that).

The one big issue I see with this forecast--other than that it's reductivist reductionist economic nonsense, which for me is its whole appeal--is that this year's GDP numbers are eventually going to be revised, and most people who know what they're talking about seem to think they'll be revised downward.

Bloomberg has a story this morning about how some high-profile hedge fund managers—Steven Cohen, David Einhorn, Paul Singer—are opening up their funds to new investors for the first time in years. Seems they're having luck raising money, even as many of their peers are being forced to dump positions to meet redemptions.

As for what you get in return—well, that's the thing. As the Journal recently reported, a number of hedgies have moved to large cash positions after deciding to sit this market out. (A lot more have moved to cash because investors want their money back, but that's a different story.)

One of the prime examples in the Journal's piece: Steven Cohen. He's reportedly moved about half of the $14 billion in SAC Capital Advisors into money-market and other short-term securities, and plans to keep it that way for the rest of the year. Investing in cash under a hedge-fund fee structure. And here we thought they'd already thought of everything.

Barbara!

We finally got another quarter of negative GDP--the first since a year ago. The third-quarter number (-0.3%) will be revised as more data come in over the next couple of months, though, and economist Roger Kubarych of Italo-German superbank Unicredit (whose analysis was the first to land in my e-mail inbox) actually thinks it may go up.

But Kubarych is sure the fourth quarter will be bad bad bad, as is everyone else in economistland. Maury Harris at UBS predicts the economy will shrink at a 3.5% annualized pace in the fourth quarter.

Some numbers from today's GDP report show why:

consumer spending, down at a 3.1% annualized pace (adjusted for inflation)

consumer spending on durable goods, down 14.1%

capital spending (nonresidential fixed investment), down 5.1%

disposable personal income, down 8.7%

What was up? Federal government spending, up 13.8%! Although most of that was due to a big gain in defense spending. Nondefense spending was up at only a 4.8% annual pace. That should change in the next coming quarters.

Oh, and after my post on the saving rate yesterday I should note that it is down, to 1.3%, from 2.7% in the second quarter.

Finally, it should be noted that you may want to ignore all the above numbers (except the savings rate, which is calculated using non-inflation-adjusted numbers) because they're so tainted by the difficulty the government has been having in measuring inflation this year. As Kubarych's colleague Harm Bandholz (I did not call Unicredit a superbank for nothing) explains:

According to the BEA, personal consumption expenditures for food subtracted an annualized 0.89pp from GDP growth (!) - that is the second largest subtraction since 1950 and is more than the 0.80pp drag from private consumption! We think that this odd figure was likely caused by flawed deflators. As nominal spending for food decreased an annualized 0.9%, the deflator for food expenditures soared another 7-3/4%.