Friday, May 30, 2008
Bottom real?
clipped from
The economy grew at a faster pace than originally estimated in the first quarter, the government said Thursday, but the nation remained mired in its most stagnant period of growth in five years.
Gross domestic product, a measure of overall economic growth, expanded at an annual rate of 0.9 percent in the first three months, according to a Commerce Department report. That was higher than the initial estimate, released a month ago, which had put the growth rate at 0.6 percent.
dress code in recession
EARLIER this month, people promenading along the super-fashionable Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village were surprised to come upon a decidedly low-rent window display announcing an army-navy surplus store within. Wasn't that a Marc Jacobs store just last week? Could Bleecker be going downscale as fast as it had gone up?
As it turned out, the window was the dryly funny brainchild of Robert Duffy, the president of Marc Jacobs. Mr. Duffy had found a trove of vintage military coats in Copenhagen and decided to sell them in the store — for a mere $59 each. And if that sounds like a unlikely fashion statement from the man who in the 1990s had men coughing up $600 for thermal long johns in cashmere, well, talk to Mr. Duffy.
recession enron
A Nation of Enrons
An understatement: We are living through a time of considerable market and economic turmoil. Since we stand to see trillions of dollars' worth of assets vaporize in the ensuing mess, we ought to take a look at history to see how we got into it, and how investors can get out.
Half a decade ago, the entire nation was shocked when award-winning "innovator" Enron turned out to be little more than a cash-shredding pyramid scheme. The crucial failing for investors was Enron's use of opaque, "mark-to-market" accounting. The problem comes when the market is batty (or doesn't exist), so you instead mark your assets to a model, especially one that's wrong, either because you made an error or because you based it on exceedingly generous assumptions.
