Gang Of Eight Disgorges Draft Immigration Bill Early Wednesday morning, the so-called “Gang of Eight” — United States Senators Schumer, Flake, McCain, Menendez, Rubio, Graham, Bennett, and Durbin — released the text of their 844 page immigration bill. Among other provisions, the bill would give legal status and a pathway to citizenship to the estimated [...]

The Decline of the “Blue Social Model” Blogger and Bard College professor Walter Russell Meade has written for years about the decline of what he calls the Blue Social Model, the post-World War II economic structure built on unionized middle class jobs with generous wages in government at at oligopolistic private sector firms such as [...]

Micro blogging is quicker than regular blogging, but tweets are also more ephemeral: it’s pretty common for someone to read a blog post you wrote a day or a week ago, but not so common for someone to read something you tweeted an hour ago. With that in mind, I’m going to start picking 10 [...]

Well, my tweet, actually. This one got mentioned Margaret Brennan’s “InBusiness” show yesterday morning: @margbrennan You nearly died once from riding 90 mph on the NJ Turnpike without a seatbelt. Was that emblematic of your approach to risk? $$ — David Pinsen (@dpinsen) December8, 2011 I was hoping to embed a clip of Ms. Brennan [...]

Revenues, apparently.  Remember Color, the mobile app that received $41 million in venture financing a few months ago? I have AppShopper’s top-200 grossing finance app rankings bookmarked (and was pleasantly surprised to see Portfolio Armor crack into the top-5 on Thursday), but after being reminded about Color by a chapter about it (“Color and Mania [...]

Last week was an interesting week for stocks, and, if the performance of one foreign stock market that was open today is any guide, tomorrow may be interesting too. Here’s a snapshot of how stocks did on Israel’s Tel Aviv stock exchange this Sunday: Last week was also the best week yet for subscriptions to [...]

Hedging costs after the debt deal Last week, with the debt ceiling negotiations dragging on, we looked at the costs of hedging a handful of equity index, gold-, Treasury bond-, and dollar index-tracking ETFs. Below is a snapshot showing the current hedging costs of the same basket of ETFs. Hedging against a >30% correction in [...]