August 2010

Tweet Last Friday, my list of America’s Brainiest Cities ran over at The Daily Beast. Boulder topped the list, which comprised a mix of larger knowledge-intensive metros like Washington, D.C., Boston, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle, and college towns like Ithaca, Charlottesville, Madison, Iowa City, and Durham, North Carolina, among others. The index [...]

Tweet National home prices jumped a substantial 3.6% in the past year, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index released on Tuesday. Prices also climbed 4.4% in the second quarter compared with a 2.8% plunge in the first quarter. Of course, the positive report was buoyed by the government’s tax credit program, which refunded as [...]

Tweet Current and former central bankers from around the world said an uneven global economic recovery was likely to stay on track despite worries about the vitality of the U.S. economy. At an annual Federal Reserve retreat, angst, not panic, was the order of the day among officials and economists chastened by a deep recession [...]

Tweet A growing number of homeowners are choosing to pay down their mortgages at a faster rate, even if it means a substantial jump in their monthly payments. From January through June, 26% of homeowners who refinanced chose a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage, according to data from CoreLogic. During all of 2009, 18.5% of borrowers who [...]