Author Archives: Felix

Not all winning bets are smart

Don’t speculate with your home

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From Wall Street Dark Pools to Puerto Rican Swimming Pools

Slate Money on Aereo’s Supreme Court loss, and rich people flocking to Puerto Rico

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Aereo could have saved the airwaves from the broadcasters’ ransom

Spectrum has been gifted to media groups eager to cash in on what is free, writes Felix Salmon

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Hedge Fund vs. Sovereign

How U.S. Courts Are Upending International Finance

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Why Argentina Could Default … Again

Slate Money on Amazon’s new phone, the effect of the crisis in Iraq on the oil market, and Argentina’s loss at the Supreme Court

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Spinoffs, Write-downs, and Techie Taxis

Slate Money on Uber vs. Europe, Time Warner’s magazine spinoff, and Larry Summers’ favorite book

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BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti Goes Long

The media mogul (twice over) on being both contagious and sticky

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Lessons from a $110 million penthouse

The physical manifestation of r>g

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How well uberX pays, part 2

Maybe not quite as well as Uber would have you think

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Wall Street’s Toughest Judge

Slate Money on Judge Jed Rakoff, the European Central Bank, and the saga of billionaire Steven A. Cohen

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The number 2,000

Economic lessons from Brazil

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America prosecutes its interests and persecutes BNP

What we are seeing is unapologetic American exceptionalism, manifesting as extraterritorial powermongering

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One question all managers should ask themselves about pay

What’s the ratio between my pay and that of my highest-paid employee?

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The economics of “everyone’s private driver”

What happens when cab drivers stop being employees and start being sole proprietors

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Where is Felix

I left Reuters, and I’m not sure when or whether I’m going to have any kind of regular blog at Fusion. And in my new promiscuous life, it’s not going to be very easy to keep track of everything I’m … Continue reading

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James Ball on masturbatory journalism (annotated)

Read “Why can’t nerds break news instead of just explaining it?” by James Ball on News Genius

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Scoops: When journalists masturbate

“Breaking news is the most masturbating thing journalists do” – @felixsalmon, Fusion #ijf14 pic.twitter.com/Pu5elT6XRz — journalism festival (@journalismfest) April 30, 2014 This quote is beginning to get some press attention, so I ought to correct the record: I said “masturbatory”, … Continue reading

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Taxing future income to pay for college

How to pay for the seemingly inexorable rise in the cost of college tuition? One idea seems to be having something of a heyday right now: since college graduates earn more money, why not levy a tax on them which … Continue reading

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Cooper Union’s response

Here is the response I received from Jolene Travis, Assistant Director of Public Affairs, Media Relations at Cooper Union, after she read my post. Dear Felix, After reading “Occupy Cooper Union” (12/5), I writing to ask for a correction to … Continue reading

Posted in Not economics | 3 Comments

Chart of the day, Apple vs Microsoft edition

So we went back and took the closing share price of AAPL and MSFT for every day since they went public, and plotted the market cap against the p/e ratio every day. … If you stop looking at individual points and start looking just at the general shapes of the charts, there’s a strong positive correlation on the Microsoft datapoints, and a strong negative correlation on the Apple ones. Continue reading

Posted in economics | Tagged | 28 Comments

When private-school tuition is tax-deductible

Scott Asen, a former trustee and head of the development committee at Groton, a posh private school, has a revealing op-ed in the NYT. He explains that at such schools, the tuition fees, high as they are, fall well short … Continue reading

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When bloggers go offline

Posted in economics | Tagged | 17 Comments

Man U’s weird share price

But as Matt Levine noted that afternoon, after the market closed, the underwriters were clearly supporting the stock at the IPO price of $14, and the volumes being transacted at that level were truly enormous: much bigger than the official greenshoe. … But then something very weird happened when the shares reopened on Monday August 13: after half an hour at $14 per share, they suddenly spiked; at one point that morning they were more than $15 per share. Continue reading

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$5,000-an-hour lawyers

David Lat has the numbers today on how much the top partners at Dewey & Leboeuf were making. At the top of the list are Berge Setrakian and Ralph Ferrara, both of whom made around $12.5 million in 2011. As … Continue reading

Posted in economics | 8 Comments

More data on 401(k) loans

In my post about Bob Litan and his estimates of 401(k) loan defaults, one of the key bits of weirdness was the way in which he decided that the total number of 401(k) loans outstanding had doubled since 2009. The … Continue reading

Posted in economics | 4 Comments