President Obama tells us that the highest return investment you can make is in your own (or your children’s) education.  The aggregate statistics appear to bear this out with college graduates earning about 50% more than high school graduates.  Even after taking into the direct cost of four years of higher education along with the… Read more

After the market close last Thursday, JP Morgan Chase (JPM) announced that it had incurred a large loss in a “hedge” position.  The loss is rumored to be approximately $2.3 billion.  If it was truly a hedge position then there presumably is a gain on the item being hedged.  I did not see any mention… Read more

The two candidates for president in this fall’s election had very different perspectives on last Friday’s jobs report.  President Obama pointed to the 26th month in a row of private sector job gains and the  cumulative four million job gain over this period.  On the other hand, putative Republican nominee Romney assailed the paltry 115,000… Read more

This morning I ran across this piece on five people who have left the labor force.  It a why-and-how-are-they-dealing-with-it type of thing.  What struck me was that four of the five were either back in college or planning on going back to college, some for advanced degrees. Improving human capital is a reasonable response to long-term unemployment,… Read more

Some financial innovations are good ideas and make large contributions to economic growth and prosperity.  Others are not so good and can lead to bad outcomes including excessive leverage, financial fragility and even financial crises.  Economists Posner and Weyl1 suggest that it is possible to assess the potential benefits and costs for new financial products… Read more