Word: cases
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Considering the Yale professor's recent publishing history, this is quite a relief. In March 2000, as stock prices soared to record levels, Shiller released his first general-audience book. Titled Irrational Exuberance, a phrase borrowed from a 1996 Alan Greenspan speech, it made the case that stock-market investors tend to go mad every few years--and that they were at the time in the grips of perhaps their worst psychotic episode ever...
...timing of that market call wasn't quite as spot-on as that of March 2000. But it was close. According to the S&P/Case-Shiller indexes devised by Shiller and Wellesley College's Karl Case, the rise in house prices slowed in the latter half of 2005, then headed south in summer...
Shiller spent much of his early academic career--he earned a Ph.D. from MIT in 1972 and has been teaching at Yale since 1982--making the case that stock-market prices jump around more than is warranted by economic fundamentals. This may sound obvious, but it was for a time heresy among finance scholars, who believed markets were paragons of informed rationality. Since then, the academic consensus has shifted in Shiller's direction. But identifying exactly when prices have gotten out of hand isn't easy...
...classic story. the demure small-town librarian swept off her feet by the handsome prince--a story with its roots in Cinderella ... and also, in this case, in the rather unbelievable recent history of our country. The librarian is smart and attractive but almost catatonic with guilt: her carelessness behind the wheel once caused the death of a good friend. The prince is charming, as advertised, but also carefree in a way that the librarian envies and mistrusts. He adores her, without question. She succumbs, with reservations. In Curtis Sittenfeld's brilliant novel American Wife, their names are Alice Lindgren...
Sittenfeld boldly skips over the politics that lands Charlie Blackwell in the White House. It is "the part that everybody knows," Alice says, picking up the narrative in the seventh year of the Blackwell presidency. It all seems a whirlwind to Alice, in any case, a tornado spinning too fast to be comprehensible--Charlie for President? Charlie as President? Charlie as the ultimate arbiter of war and peace? Indeed, Alice belatedly finds herself facing a moral dilemma: Was it possible that the disaster of Charlie's presidency--the war, the thousands dead--was her fault, just as the long...