Jacob Goldstein

A proposed new rule would force big banks to rely less on borrowed money, and more on money that belongs to the banks themselves.

This rule has lots of interesting context, which includes words and phrases such as Basel, capital ratios, and risk-weighting. But here's the nub of ...

On the show last month, we talked about high-speed traders paying thousands of dollars to get access to important data two seconds before the rest of the world.

By most accounts, this is entirely legal. The data are privately collected, and sold to subscribers by Thomson ...

Yes, economists love the idea of taxing carbon to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (See our story from last week.) But there's a potential problem with a carbon tax.

Say a bunch of countries start taxing carbon. It works! Fossil fuel demand falls in those countries. But falling demand ...

Of all the stuff on metadata I've seen in the past few weeks, this is my favorite:

It's my favorite in large part because it's my metadata. It comes from my Gmail account. The relationships it maps are, more or less, my life — orange circles for Planet ...

Yesterday, an anonymous, soon-to-be-failed entrepreneur started a blog called "My Startup Has 30 Days To Live." It's a good, bitter counterpoint to all the Silicon Valley hype.

In the first post, the founder blames himself for his company's imminent failure.

... when my startup fails, ...

The birthday song — Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, etc. — is still under copyright protection. If you want to sing the song on TV, or in a restaurant, or whatever, you have to pay a licensing fee to Warner/Chappell, the music company that owns the rights. ...

"The music industry is a microcosm of what is happening in the U.S. economy at large," Alan Krueger, on of President Obama's top economic advisers, said yesterday. "We are increasingly becoming a 'winner-take-all economy' ..."

Krueger, who once wrote a paper called Rockonomics, was speaking at ...

In cities around the world, technology is threatening the taxi and Towncar business, and the people who own taxi and Towncar companies are going to courts and lawmakers for protection.

A New York court just ruled against Towncar operators who were trying to prevent people from using smartphone ...

Economists think prices are close to magic — constantly changing signals that help people figure out what to buy and who to buy it from (and what to sell and who to sell it to).

But in health care, it seems like nobody knows the price of anything.

Earlier this year, the percentage of Americans who are working or looking for work fell to its lowest level since 1979.

The figure (wonks call it labor force participation rate) rose for decades, as more women entered the workforce. It started falling over a decade ago. And the decline is ...

Twenty years ago this week, researchers renounced the right to patent the World Wide Web. Officials at CERN, the European research center where the Web was invented, wrote:

CERN relinquishes all intellectual property to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, ...

If you:

1. Live in a state that charges sales tax

and

2. Buy something from an online store that does not charge you sales tax,

then you are supposed to:

3. Calculate the sales tax yourself and add it onto your annual state tax bill.

Not surprisingly, as

The world loves the U.S. dollar.

When, say, a South African businessman buys supplies from China, he pays in U.S. dollars. When central banks hold foreign reserves, they favor dollars. And, all over the world, when things start to get crazy, people start putting $100 bills ...

After rising for years, the price of gold is now falling sharply. Lots of people are saying the gold bubble is over. It isn't.

I have no idea whether the price of gold will rise or fall. But even if gold loses half its value tomorrow, ...

Until well into the 19th century, if you lived in the U.S. and wanted to heat your house, fire your forge, or whatever, you did what people had done for thousands of years: You chopped down a tree and burned it.

It wasn't until the rise of the railroads in ...

"It's an un-obvious chunk of meat that has been sitting there — a little diamond surrounded by a bunch of coal," Steve Price told me last year. "I'd love to tell you more. We just can't."

Today, Price told me everything. More to the point, he emailed me ...

The economy added 88,000 jobs last month, according to today's disappointing jobs report. That's not even enough to keep up with population growth.

As of March, 11.7 million people were unemployed. But that number doesn't include people who were working part time because they couldn't find a full-time job. ...

Note: This podcast was originally published in 2011. With North Korea in the news again this week, we're re-running it today.

North Korea relies on charity to feed its starving people. But the country's elites like their luxuries — imported wine, fine china, dancing shoes.

To buy those ...