Industry Figure Tom Chappell

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 [...]

In a naked and desperate move to court the hypothetical PUMA vote, McCain names Sarah Palin, a 44-year-old woman as his pick for Vice President.
What do we know about her? Well, she’s an book-banning, creationism-teaching, abstinence-only, anti-choice evangelical, for starters — I can hear the stampedes of supposed disaffected Democrats already!
And then [...]

From Slate.com:
You know her. She’s got wild eyes and rumpled hair. At some point she stopped caring about the stains on her blouse. She’s hurt, angry, rejected, and she’s willing to take the whole damn place down with her. She is Lady Macbeth. She is Jane Eyre’s deranged pyromaniac Bertha Mason. She is Cruella DeVil [...]

Another milestone, as our nation’s great newspapers fade into the sunset, on Calculated Risk.
Consider that both the reporter and the editor would have had to let this mistake slip through.
That’s right, the freaking Washington Post!

…a term I’d never heard before.
Keri Rainsberger isn’t rich. She works in the nonprofit world for a relatively low-profit salary. Yet, as many Americans are scrimping for every penny, she hardly feels the pinch.
…”I live so far below my means that it doesn’t really register,” says Rainsberger, a 31-year-old Chicagoan with a wiry frame and [...]

Here’s a link to my lender page at kiva.org, a charitable micro-lender that connects lenders to borrowers, all over the world.
Note that the bottom of the lender page lists the distribution amongst gender and locale.
How it works: you make small loans to small entrepreneurs. They pay you back.

Olesya Mikitina is my cutest recipient — if you’re in [...]

The wonderful Glen Greenwald has posted a terrific critique of Barack Obama’s defense of his abject cave on the FISA extension bill, featuring telecom immunity, after previously promising to veto it.
(”Freaking spineless Democrats!” — oh, uh… ok, all better now)
Obama says he will vote to remove immunity from the bill but knows full well that [...]