Megan McArdle

Felix Salmon has a really interesting piece about a professor who took out a loan from a personal finance company--at a roughly 40% APR--after her credit union turned her away.Is it a good idea for the professor to be taking out loans at 40% interest rates? Really, she didn't have much of a choice. She needed the money, she got precious little help from her credit union, and the loan company was friendly and extended her the cash on terms she could afford. What's… More »

Well that was fast. The Wall Street Journal reports that Italian bond yields are back up above the critical 7% threshhold where interest rates threaten the country's fiscal stability. But that's not even the worst news. The same blog post suggests that Spain may be the real problem. It cites Marc Chandler of Brown Brothers Harriman, who is . . . well, how do you say "bearish" in Spanish?Spain, unlike Italy, has a housing and real estate bubble. The full… More »

The economist equivalent of a brawl is going on between Paul Krugman and the guys at Marginal Revolution. I'm not going to pile into the dispute directly--I prefer both the style and substance of Marginal Revolution, but am well aware that Paul Krugman has forgotten more economics than I will ever know.However, I will note that the commenters Paul Krugman sends to other sites harbor a very strange faith in his predictive powers. When other economists dispute… More »

There are obese people who lose weight and keep it off, but they do so by superhuman attention to their diets and energy output. More »

'Homeland' botches its depiction of the nation's capitol More »

Last year, I expressed moderate unconcern that our house was probably worth less than we paid for it. This year, our very immediate neighborhood experienced something of a hyperlocal housing bubble, as houses on our block and the one immediately south of it sold for hundreds of thousands more than we'd paid. These houses were, to be sure, fully renovated (unlike ours) and had finished basements (alas, unlike ours). Nonetheless, they imply that at the very least,… More »

One question that came up over and over was how to decide between tax-deferred savings (IRA, 401(k), SEP) or tax-advantaged savings (Roth 401(k)/Roth IRA). Or why save in a retirement account at all, when you have prepayment penalties, and the capital gains rate is lower than the tax rate that you'll pay on a traditional IRA or 401(k) when you withdraw the funds?The answer is that tax-advantaged (deferred or otherwise) is always better. Choosing between tax… More »

The head of DC's Fraternal Order of Police sent a rather blistering open letter to Mayor Vincent Gray, chastising him for not admitting that the OccupyDC protests are causing a rise in crime, as neighborhood policing resources are pulled away in order to police the protests.One needs to take this with a grain of salt--gentrification is creating a lot more opportunities for muggings and property crimes, which may have something to do with the spike he identifies. … More »

After haranguing people to save yesterday, I naturally received queries about what one should put one's money in. Fair warning: I am an inherently conservative investor who takes a rather brute force approach to savings--which is to say that I think that the amount of input is much more important than cleverness in one's investment allocations.Indeed, having graduated from the University of Chicago, home of the efficient markets hypothesis, I am rather skeptical… More »

In between the happiness of Christmas and the promise of the New Year, permit me to introduce a sour note, a hint of a scold. If you're like, well, almost everybody, you're not saving enough. 15% of each paycheck into the 401(k) is the bare minimum you can get away with, not some aspirational level you can maybe hope to hit someday when you don't have all these problems. I mean, obviously if one out of two workers in your household just lost their job, or has… More »

Nahant, Massachusetts, 7:03 am on December 25th: May all your days be merry and bright. More »

Now that Obama's dog has won the War on Christmas, or something, it's time to get down to a war that really matters: the war on terrible, lying infographics, which have become endemic in the blogosphere, and constantly threaten to break out into epidemic or even pandemic status.The reservoir of this disease of erroneous infographics is internet marketers who don't care whether the information in their graphics is right ... just so long as you link it. As a… More »

I'd like to think that there's some alternative to raising kids in a sort of well-padded, benevolent police state where no action is too small or large that it can't be managed with a gold star. More »

It seems that the LA Unified School District recently revamped its lunch menus to eliminate fattening standbys like chicken nuggets, nachos, and flavored milk. The resulting meals are much healthier, but apparently also much less appetizing. As a result, participation in the program is down, and the LA Times found students replacing the Beef Jambalaya and lentil cutlets with things like Cheetos.This happened despite the fact that the menu was tested extensively… More »

Busted banking careers, crashed consultants, and shrunken incomes: the author attends her 10-year business-school reunion for lessons on how M.B.A.s can survive a recession.

As we all sit here hoping that North Korea does not launch an invasion force across the DMZ, or let some crazy guy get his hands on their nuclear weapons, we should try to remember that there's also a best-case scenario. And that that best-case scenario is still really terrible:Consider another, not wholly dissimilar case. In the late 1980s, just before reunification, it is estimated that per-capita gross domestic product in East Germany was approximately 30… More »

In novels published well into the 20th century, the cleanliness of the Dutch is a running stereotype, along with the genial, not-quite-bright Irish people and the stingy Scots. A fascinating post by Doctor Science offers the explanation for this fanatic cleanliness. Though you should read the whole thing, here's the shorter:1. The Dutch got into home dairy production in a big way at a time when most of European cities were still squalidly filthy.2. Dairy… More »

After I posted the Kitchen Gift Guide, several readers asked me for cookbook recommendations. Though I included a few of these in the gift guide, i thought it might be nice to expand the list all in one place. Here are my go-to's for broad, general cooking:1. Betty Crocker 1950 Picture Cookbook Absolutely gloriously retro. There are 7 basic food groups instead of four, the recipes use butter instead of oil, and there are helpful tips on stretching your meat… More »

A couple of days ago, I referred to the fact that poor people face some of the highest marginal tax rates in America. I received several emails from economics professors, gently correcting me: they face all the highest marginal tax rates in America. Because they lose benefits and tax credits, it can actually cost them money to get better jobs. That some of them take those better jobs anyway is a stunning testament to the power of character. This is what those… More »

I think the people that I am arguing with about "strategic mortgage default" are probably closer to my position than they think they are. Just to clarify a few things:1. I do not want any change in the laws surrounding default; I think mortgage default is a necessary safety valve for the financially troubled.2. The people I am talking about are people who can afford their mortgages, but would rather have taken out an exotic option to buy the house if it happened… More »