That can’t be right.
In response to my call for examples of dubious published numbers that might obey Curmudgeon’s Law of Numerical Fiction, frequent commenter GPR suggested a real gem. The artists Christo and his wife Jeanne-
Claude want to construct one of their larger works of art over a river in Colorado. This will, we are told, add just shy of $200 million to the local economy.
Although it will take two years to build Over The River, and several months to take it down, the artwork will exist in all its glory for only two weeks. During this time, OTR will attract, the artists claim, 380,000 visitors, 62% of them from out of state. Another 180,000 will show up to see it being built and torn down. This will generate $195.5 million in economic activity, $78.3 million of which will be spent in the Denver metro area.
Denver is about two hours from the base of the site, assuming normal traffic, which seems unlikely.
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The latest hot topic on the identity theft front is a paper published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by two professors at Carnegie Mellon on how easy it is to guess a person’s social security number.
That day Ars Technica reported on it. Also, the authors of the paper started a blog on it. The AP picked it up Tuesday. CrunchGear blogged on it then too. And Wednesday brought posts from Wise Bread and Wallet Pop.
This is a great story. It combines several of my favorite themes. There’s the ever amusing hysteria over identity theft, which apparently renders a person incapable of rational thought and perspective. There are the unintended consequences of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time government policies. And there is the recurring phenomenon of folks who report and comment on academic papers without reading and/or understanding them.
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There is an article, and I use that term loosely, in the current issue of Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs. It’s certainly not a publication I normally read, in fact I think this may be the first copy I have ever owned, but the the Goldman 
piece has gotten a little buzz going and one of my commenters told me to read it. (The full thing is not available on-line in authorized form. Google and you can find bootlegs. Legal excerpts here.)
Admittedly, I expected little from an issue whose cover story was "Boys to Men: Inside the World of the Jonas Brothers." But Matt Taibbi’s Goldman diatribe, "The Bailout: How Goldman Sachs Runs Washington" is truly nauseatingly horrible.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it is everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
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Yesterday, being the last Tuesday of June, was, obviously, the day they released the April Standard & Poor’s/Case Shiller Home Price Index numbers. If you are a regular reader of this blog you know I think this is just about the only useful data we get on the housing market. And house prices aren’t just
important to us consumer-homeowners, they are central to the whole Great Recession thing.
Judging by Tuesday afternoon headlines, the data wasn’t so good. "U.S. Home Price Declines Moderating, Index Says" leads the story in The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal has "Home Prices Drop at Slower Pace", Bloomberg tells us "Home-Price Slide Eases" and the Boston Globe carries a story with the headline "Home prices post 18.1 percent annual drop in April".
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It would never occur to me to give out some bits of advice if somebody else hadn’t first suggested an unwise alternative. Some things seem just so obvious and uncontroversial that writing them up would be pointless. Then I read something that reminds me this is the personal finance world I am talking about.
Case in point is rolling your old 401k over into an IRA when you leave your job. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money, this is not the no-brainer I foolishly assumed. It is a conundrum. Who knew?
In case you are not up to speed on the deal with 401ks once you stop working where the 401k lives, you basically have four choices. You can cash out the money in the form of a distribution, on which you will pay income taxes and, assuming you are under 59 1/2, an additional 10% penalty. That’s probably not a good idea unless you seriously needed the cash. (For example if you just lost your job.)
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Claude want to construct one of their larger works of art over a river in Colorado. This will, we are told, add just shy of $200 million to the local economy.
Government, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
July 10, 2009 12:15 pm | 
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