Mayor Bloomberg announced his budget this afternoon for the fiscal year that starts in July. The mayor expects that a combination of federal stimulus, state funds, tax hikes, spending cuts, and labor givebacks will close a $4 billion budget gap tha Read More
New York City's economy contracted 5.5 percent in the fourth quarter from the same period a year earlier, after a 2.7 percent contraction in the third quarter, according to the . The most recent figure is the worst in the nearly two decades since th Read More
The House passed the $819 billion stimulus last night. The final version contains some amendments that affect the (tiny) infrastructure-investment part of the bill. Two amendments are good, though not good enough to outweigh the fact that only fiv Read More
NYU prof Thomas Philippon and U-VA Prof Ariell Reshef have written a tracing the trajectory of wages in the American financial sector over the last century. Not surprisingly, financial-industry wages broke away from the rest of the economy starting i Read More
The best fiscal news for New York in ages is that three and a half years ago, the city lost its bid to host the 2012 Olympics. This week, the UK, which won the bid, , because the private partners couldn't find financing for the "Olympic Village" a Read More
For New York, it's not paying (anymore) to be home to the smartest guys in the room. Since its credit-bubble peak, the securities industry has cut 3.1 percent of its jobs nationwide, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Assoc Read More
Congratulations to President Obama! One of the new president's first tasks will be figuring out how to get Congress to fix the stimulus bill that the House proposed last week. In its current form, the bill won't do much for road and rail infras Read More
Data point #1. Metropolitan Transportation Authority executive director Elliot Sander and the authority's board members attracted more than 600 people to their marathon six-and-a-half-hour fare-hike and service-cut hearing in Manh Read More