Archive for May, 2006

A Tale of Different Deaths

Death hovers nearby always, and in all ways. The body keeps working, proving over and over again that it is nearly always impervious to perturbation, until it doesn’t, and then it simply let’s go — let’s go of the spark, acquiesces into hardness, entropies its perhaps-not-so-merry way toward the cold: […]

First there is no inflation, and then there is

Today brings another report of an inflation number that appears to be high, but which, we are then told, is not high. So today we hear that April’s Producer Price Index (the PPI ) came in at 0.9% overall, but only 0.1% at the core. The difference, the standard lingo […]

Louis Passes

Louis Rukeyser passed away yesterday. More than anyone, I owe my financial wonkiness to Louis. As a kid, I used to watch him every Friday night — probably for the better part of three decades. Wall Street Week was, then, where I learned a good chunk of what I know […]

Is it Time to Rescind the Biggest No-Go Zone of All?

Warning: this essay is all questions, no answers. * * * There are lots of no-go zones in our lives, are there not? Our lives are filled with things that we simply don’t do when we’re among people, n’est pas? Call them rules or social niceties or manners or what […]