Industry Figure Tom Chappell

Despite my insane shyness with strangers, I made six calls for Obama this evening, via his phone-bank-from-home web site. The web site just kept feeding me names, phone numbers, and polling places. I could tell people where their polling places were, and if they needed a ride to their polling place, I could […]

Received tonight from the Obama campaign:
Thomas –
I’m the Chief Financial Officer for Barack Obama’s campaign. I track the donations coming in and the expenses going out.
I asked for the opportunity to write to you directly so that I could try to explain what’s happening right now.
This organization has thousands of employees and spends millions of […]

The promised long version of “The Week America’s Economy Almost Died”, the sequel to The Giant [Global] Pool of Money, has shipped!
Okay, for those keeping track, this market freeze-up has been compared, so far in our story, to an oncoming train, an abyss, a monster, and an earthquake. All we need now is […]

The terrific National Public Radio / Public Radio International team that brought you May’s fantastic story on the subprime meltdown, The Giant [Global] Pool of Money, have prepared a new show on the ongoing credit crisis to air this weekend on PRI’s This American Life.
It will be available for streaming or downloading shortly afterward, but […]

So there I was, reading random news reports about the horrible bailout bill, and thinking bitter thoughts about our ‘representatives’ in Congress, apparently heedless of the calls and faxes that have been running anywhere from 100-to-1 to 300-to-1 against (”They’re running 50% ‘No’, and 50% ‘Hell No!’”, as Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) put it).
And then, […]

What a good company! Makes our family want to buy more of their stock, or do a search, or something:
…while there are many objections to this proposition [banning gay marriage] — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our […]

From a Weiss Research white paper on the financial crisis:
Although it is true that the current debt crisis in America originated in the mortgage market, it is not accurate to say that the root of the crisis is strictly in this one sector. Rather, the debt crisis has multiple and varied roots, with excessive risk-taking […]

Well, wasn’t that a fun week! I’m sure that everybody is nicely worked up into a lather over the ever-larger and ever-more-frequent collapses this year. As economist Nouriel Roubini writes:
Even the Washington policy makers finally realized that this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and that their ad hoc step-by-step and […]

A global perspective from Jonathan Freedland, in The Guardian, on our horrible election:
If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger. And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift.
Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside […]

Yes, you can speculate on whether or not the hilariously unqualified GOP VP pick, Sarah Palin, will step down before the election:
How? Click on the graph to go to InTrade, and press the Trade button.
Graph displays recent action; all times in UTC:

The price is labeled on the right-hand axis, showing implied percent chance that the […]