Michael Gracie 

Sick of hearing about it, or waiting until after the fact Mark Hopkins of Mashable does a pretty good job of railing against the pundits here. And his definition of recession is certainly correct – two successive quarters of GDP decline. However, I believe that a lot of the chatter being heard is a reflection [...]

As far as religion goes, maybe ever (at least via the web) I believe in god but not in religion organized by man. And I think the men (and women) who have cloaked themselves in the name of god have often done great harm. Religion is not the root of all evil but the people [...]

Nobody got the memo, and I got all this in my feed reader simultaneously The Obvious, to everyone other than the NAR – Home Prices Fall 12.7% (The Big Picture) The Cheers, from Walmart shareholders – Consumer confidence drops in April on inflation, job worries (Associated Press) The Quandary, from the Taxpayer Defamation League – [...]

Gold prices notwithstanding, this is unsolicited and extraordinarily well-deserved praise I own a bit of Marmot gear, mostly outerwear, and it’s not because I’m spoiled or have money to burn – despite being twice the price of what you’d call “comparable” items, their stuff just seems worth it. Reasoning: it’s apparent when looking at their [...]

Barry Ritholtz: The chart above shows a steady deterioration in the balance sheets of the states and cities of the US since the late ’90′s. Check out the chart…it sure does. One has to wonder why anyone was surprised when municipal bond auctions started failing.

VCs are doing it. Should you? It’s pretty obvious by looking at these pages that I don’t have much taste for widgets. Now, it seems, at least one blogging venture capitalist is taking widgets to task – cleaning them out because they slow down page loading time. While I’d like to say I’m a trendsetter, [...]

Sad but true The Chinese equities market has not been performing well. But regulators and market makers have the answer. According to Bloomberg: China may limit new share sales and allow investors to borrow money to buy equities in an effort to boost the world’s sixth worst-performing stock market… They are going to restrict the [...]

It’s getting to be that time again…

Adam Ostrow: While I might expect a start-up going after the early adopter techie crowd to take so much for granted, this is Microsoft, the world’s largest software company that is virtually unavoidable in at least some part of everyone’s digital lives. But Microsoft has made no effort to explain what RSS is, how to [...]

Realtor spin, in chart form (and with lovely footnotes). (h/t to The Big Picture)