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In case you missed it in our last post, it’s worth breaking out this chart of U.S. home prices since 1970, provided by the blog Bubble Meter. When you look at it now, it’s hard not to think “Of course there was a bubble!” (Just like when you look at my favorite long-term chart: The [...]

Since the country, in the form of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, is now officially delving into the causes of the financial collapse, it might be instructive to take a look back at who among the analysts and punditocracy thought the housing bubble — a precursor to the systemic implosion — wasn’t really a bubble [...]

In December, the Detroit News reported that the unemployment rate of the city, officially at 27%, was really closer to 45%. Here’s a nicely observed blog post from Detroit native M. Hannington about some of the people on the lowest rungs of the city’s economic ladder.

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 [...]

The dot-com collapse, Enron, September 11th, Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami, and an historic real estate bust, financial panic, and recession. The good times just never seemed to end in the 2000s, which Time called The Decade from Hell. Now the Magazine Publishers of America and the American Society of Magazine Editors have created this [...]

Over at EconomyStory.org yesterday, one user posted this comment: It’s time for my micro indicator to broaden its horizons. For 20 years, I’ve interpreted cars with a burned out headlight as an indicator of economic decline. If I see three in the 25 minutes it takes me to get home, it’s still a recession. I’ve [...]

The job search portal CareerCast.com published its 10 best and 10 worst jobs for 2010. Methodology: “To quantify the many facets of the 200 jobs included in our report, we determined and reviewed various critical aspects of all of the jobs, categorizing them into five “Core Criteria;” that is, the general categories that are inherent [...]