Time for another go-round — our third — with The Brian Lehrer Show’s Uncommon Economic Indicators web page, where people submit signs of the recession observed around the New York City area. These won’t show up in any government statistics or charts, but they turn the abstract gloom of macroeconomic numbers into a concrete picture [...]

Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (that’s SIGTARP to you) has released his Quarterly Report to Congress, which you can read here in .pdf. The opening section of the Executive Summary is below. My own executive summary:

• The financial system is far more stable in parts than at the height of the crisis in fall, 2008. Banks can raise funds and many formerly on the verge of collapse have repaid the emergency government loans early. These repayments have resulted in a profit for the U.S. Treasury on some of the TARP investments, decreasing the cost of the bailout to taxpayers.
• The TARP goal of increasing financing to U.S. businesses and consumers has not been met, as lending continues to decrease and home foreclosures remain at record levels. The repayment of government funds by banks and the exit of the U.S. as a major shareholder in the banks have signficantly decreased the government’s ability to influence the policies of these financial institutions.
• Fundamental problems in the financial system have not been addressed to date, and “too big to fail” institutions are even larger, thanks in part to TARP and other bailout programs. Incentives to take reckless risk are even greater, as the market is convinced government will step in to cover losses that could threaten the system. Executive compensation also remains an incentive to take inordinate risks.
• The government’s efforts to support home prices risk re-inflating a housing bubble.

A severe recession, crippling unemployment, a housing collapse, long-lasting foreign wars, a growing chasm between rich and poor, and a political system crippled by partisan gridlock, unable to grapple with entrenched problems…not a few commentators have speculated that American hegemony is rapidly waning, and that an analogy to the Fall of Rome might be in [...]

When you buy gas at the pump, ever wonder where the money goes? Oxfam America clues us in with their Follow the Money video:

Today on the podcast: be afraid! Fear turns out be a very good thing for certain businesses. When the Weather Service warns of a hurricane, there’s a run on plywood and water. A crime spree sends people to the gun store. And when North Korea or Iran starts making nuclear noise, the orders pour in [...]

To be sure, there is a lot of support — mostly from conservatives — for yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend as much as they want in supporting or opposing political candidates. But the ruling has also set off a fury of apocalyptic posting by progressives and other observers who see it as [...]

From the research and consulting firm Emergent Technology, a post on small business trends this year: Economic Trends 1. The Shift to Contingent Workers Turns Employees into Entrepreneurs: Employers large and small are shifting from full-time employees to part-timers, freelancers, outsourced services, partnership arrangements and other forms of contingent workers. They are doing this to [...]

Today marked the first meeting of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. The Christian Science Monitor reports: The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is a bipartisan 10-member committee that’s been handed the job of recording what went wrong prior to the near-collapse of the world financial systems in 2008. Congress has ordered the commission to work through [...]

From Ribbonfarm.com, a blog about “business and innovation,” written by Venkatesh Rao, who works at the Xerox Innovation Group. Rao has written two posts — “The Office According to ‘The Office’” and “Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk” — dissecting NBC’s hit sit-com “The Office” as “an interpretation of The Office as management science.”

“The Office” is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully-realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore…

Hugh MacLeod’s cartoon is a pitch-perfect symbol of an unorthodox school of management based on the axiom that organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs.

Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. So while most management literature is about striving relentlessly towards an ideal by executing organization theories completely, this school, which I’ll call the Whyte school, would recommend that you do the bare minimum organizing to prevent chaos, and then stop…

This post on Joe Sent Me , a blog for business travellers, is nine months old, but I like it anyway. Using an anonymous interview with an airline executive as a launching point, blogger Joe Brancatelli argues that the airlines that imposed baggage and other fees the quickest are the ones that are losing the [...]