Barrett Sheridan

Does the DJIA Matter?: Amidst the cacophonous response to the General Motors, the Dow Jones company announced it was removing both Citigroup and General Motors from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a weighted index of 30 leading stocks.

The Road to Bankruptcy: General Motors will follow Chrysler into bankruptcy this week. Check out the Financial Times' interactive graphic on the last decade of the company's history to see how it got here.

Another One Bites the Dust: Not that it's unexpected, but General Motors will file for bankruptcy next week. The automotive giant will be split into a good bank and a bad bank, er, a good car company and a bad car company.

There will be plenty of books written about this period of economic history, but perhaps the most interesting will be the one that tackles the Porsche-Volkswagen drama.

Wake Up, Americans!: That's what John Taylor wants to shout from the rooftops, or at least the op-ed page of the Financial Times, in order to get us to pay attention to our soaring national debt.

Think You See Green Shoots? You're Wrong: Nouriel Roubini, aka Dr. Doom, must have some strange biological or neurochemical processes in place that give him pleasure for undercutting optimists.

Is this an industry scare tactic to prevent unwanted regulation, or a real threat?Now Congress is moving to limit the penalties on riskier [credit card] borrowers, who have become a prime source of billions of dollars in fee revenue for the industry.

Singh His Praises: India's Congress Party, headed by economist Manmohan Singh, pulled off a major victory over the weekend. Pundits took it as a mandate for economic reforms, and a surprising win for the ruling party in a country that loves to kick its leaders to the curb after one term.

Imagine if you took the Oscars, which recognize "excellence in filmmaking," and decided instead to honor "excellence in anything shown on a screen of any kind." Welcome to the Webbys, a boundless and silly salute to the online universe.

Silicon Valley is full of imperial visionaries whose mission is to take down Google, which now controls about 64 percent of the search market worldwide. They range from Microsoft to newcomers like Cuil, but all of them have ended up merely battling one another on the outskirts of Google's dominion, fighting for the shrinking number of searches that Google hasn't yet figured out how to conquer.Then there is physicist Stephen Wolfram.

Every good businessperson has a favored statistic about China. I remember meeting the son of a vineyard owner in Napa Valley, who was helping his parents take their modest business global. "Think about it," he told me. "If we sold a bottle of wine to every Chinese millionaire, we'd run out of wine before we ran out of millionaires!"I haven't kept in touch with the oenophile, so I don't know how his well-laid plans played out, but Dan Gross has been keeping tabs on how some major American brands...

The Dollar Loses Its Groove in China: An op-ed by Nouriel Roubini the New York Times says the dollar may not lose its reserve currency status overnight, but "we can no longer take it for granted," and the renminbi may take its place.

Where Are Argentina's Coins?: This is for sure the strangest story of the week. Argentina is facing a mysterious coin shortage. Some small convenience stores would rather turn down business than give out change.

Welcome to Shangkong: A year or two ago, New York and London battled each other to be crowned seat of global finance. But, writing in the Financial Times, Yale professor (and regular Newsweek International contributor) Jeffrey Garten argues that, "once the global recovery begins, New York and London might be vying less with one another than with a new competitor in the form of a partnership between Hong Kong and Shanghai – call it 'Shangkong' – a highly consequential shift of financial...

Everybody is talking about last weekend's Saturday Night Live skit with Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg singing "Motherlover," but for you econophiles out there, you might want to skip the pop-comic songfest in favor of the "Geithner Cold Open." "Initially, my department had planned to give each bank a numerical grade of one to 100.

Stress-Free Friday: A stress test wrap-up from the NYT. On Your Marx...: Venezuela's Hugo Chavez responds to the recession by nationalizing the docks and boats owned by oil-services companies like Halliburton and Schlumberger.Gold Bugs Beware: All the bears are screaming "Buy gold!" to hedge against inflation, but check this interactive graphic on the history of gold prices first.

Levantine doomsayer Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of "The Black Swan," has been everywhere lately, appearing on a Planet Money podcast last week and then this morning at the New Yorker Summit. (He also co-authored a new research paper.) The upshot of his latest message is extreme: ban debt.Taleb claims that debt is a risk-enabler.

In a new song, Merle Hazard and his singing partner Bretton Wood ask: Inflation or deflation?Tell me, if you canWill we become Zimbabwe?Or will we be Japan? Watch the whole thing:(Hat tip: Calculated Risk)

Obama declared war on corporate tax evaders today, unveiling a plan that will make it harder for companies to hide money offshore indefinitely and, in so doing, raise an extra $103.1 billion over 10 years (according to the Administration's math, at least). (For background, check here.)The response from corporate America was predictable.

The Oracle Speaks: The annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting featured lots of words of wisdom from the Sage of Omaha. Buffett said financiers' greed and stupidity contributed to the crisis and he criticized the bank stress tests.

Another One Bites the Dust: The federal government put Chrysler into bankruptcy protection yesterday, and the New York Times argues that "if the process is prolonged, the costs and complexity would likely ensure that the company would never emerge from bankruptcy proceedings." Obama blamed "a small group of speculators" who "were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices and they would have to make none," he said. (John Gapper defends the hedge funds and "speculators" here.) The new,...

From Megan McArdle, on BofA's Ken Lewis: I don't find it hard to believe that Ken Lewis genuinely believed that he was singlehandedly saving the US financial system [by absorbing Merrill Lynch]...But that doesn't really matter.  If my husband sacrificed our child to save thousands of people, I might recognize, at some abstract level, that he had done the right thing.

Stripped: During a shareholder meeting that at times seemed more like a circus, investors voted to strip Ken Lewis of his chairmanship of the board. The embattled financier will remain CEO of the company -- for now, at least."You Sneeze, You Go Home": That's the rule at Mexico City brokerages, where stock traders slip on face masks in between client phone calls.

We humans get confused by large numbers. So how large is $100 million in the context of the U.S. budget? One blogger shows us using stacks of pennies:Related: Here's one person's effort to visualize what $1 trillion looks like. (Hat tip: Megan McArdle)

Spotted on 57th St. in New York. Do you think a "Business Crisis Sale" offers better discounts than a "Recession Special"?

Wow, the GDP figures released today are abysmal: the economy shrank at an annualized rate of 6.1 percent last quarter. "GDP has now dropped for three straight quarters for the first time since 1974-1975," according to Reuters.This is much worse than what economists expected (a 4.9 percent drop), but pretty close to Goldman Sachs' prediction of a seven-percent decline.

Rahm Emanuel famously said what everyone was thinking when he noted earlier this year that "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste." The financial industry has been bruised and battered.

Stressful Days: Bloomberg reports that six of the country's 19 largest banks will be told to find more capital when the results of the stress quiz, er, test are revealed next week.

It's a sign of exactly how complicated our current situation is that even as straightforward a task as tallying how much money the U.S. government has spent so far on bailouts is nearly impossible.