Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The shirt reads NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH in the flat, declarative register of a warning label. Above the words sits a yellow caution triangle. Inside the triangle, a hand is crossed out with a diagonal slash. The design does not ask a question, […]
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The design is a rectangle. That is the first thing to notice, and it is not a trivial observation. On the shirt, a black-and-white speckled field fills most of the front panel, bounded on the left by a dark vertical strip that reads as […]
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. On a white shirt, the words I HAD POTENTIAL sit in capital letters above a curved ramp. A dashed circle rests on the upper left ledge. A solid ball sits on the lower right flat ledge. The ramp descends from left to right, and […]
On any business day, between 12:45 and 1:15 p.m. Eastern, the Open Market Trading Desk at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York runs an auction. It sells Treasury securities from the System Open Market Account and agrees to buy them back the next morning. The difference between the sale price and the repurchase price […]
The garment preview shows a dark shirt. Centered on it, in very small lowercase letters, is the word meh, followed by a period. No animal. No slogan. No flag. No second line of text. The scale is the argument: the word is set small enough that a reader has to lean in, and the period […]
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The artwork on the Let’s Root For Each Other And Watch Each Other Grow Garden shirt arranges its words in a ring. LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW runs around four smiling root vegetables — a carrot, a radish, a […]
There is a sentence in the Federal Reserve Act that is easy to read past. It sits in Section 4, paragraph 11, and it says that the three Class B directors of each Federal Reserve Bank “shall represent the public.” The same paragraph says they “shall be elected” — and the election, under paragraph 16, […]
On July 21, 2010, Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act. Buried in Title IX, Section 956 ran nine paragraphs. It told six agencies—the SEC, the Federal Reserve, the OCC, the FDIC, and the FHFA—to jointly write rules prohibiting incentive-based compensation at financial firms that encouraged inappropriate risk. Congress gave them nine months. The clock started […]
Household formation is the least glamorous statistic in American macroeconomics and one of the most consequential. The Census Bureau counts a household every time one or more people occupy a housing unit of their own; formation happens when a young adult leaves a parent’s home, a couple marries and signs a first lease, a first […]
Healthcare spending is not a neutral transfer of resources from the healthy to the sick. It is a distributional machine that quietly moves wealth upward through the specific design of statutes, scoring conventions, accounting rules, and monetary facilities. The main entity here is the healthcare-finance complex: the interlocking system of Medicare, Medicaid, employer-sponsored insurance, tax […]