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Where the numbers come from

Latest materials

Everything published on this domain, newest first: the explainers written for this portal, the archive of the earlier column at its original addresses, and the commercial pages kept there alongside it. This is the general feed — a piece shows up here on the day it is filed, next to whatever section it belongs to, so the page moves before any single desk does.

A building under renovation beside an open excavation
Housing

How an HOA Special Assessment Works

The special assessment letter in your mailbox did not come out of nowhere. It is the arithmetic of a funding gap the reserve study already mapped.

A former bank building on a downtown corner
Credit

The Bank Failed. Your Loan Did Not.

A bank closing does not wipe out a mortgage, a car loan, or a credit-card balance. The debt moves under a published receivership process.

Gaming economy

Online Gambling Gaining at Retail's Expense

Economists are warning that the explosive growth of online gambling is siphoning off increasingly large portions of household spending that would otherwise go to

Credit

The Macroeconomics of Deleveraging

The Macroeconomics of Deleveraging Brandon Adams Charles Dickens said of debtors’ prisons, “Any one can go IN…but it is not every one who can go out.” [1] In

Society

Response for @Epicurean Deal

I can safely say that, of the 400+ people I follow on Twitter, @EpicureanDeal is one of my five favorites (the others: @pkedrosky @robdelaney @zerohedge

Markets

An Interview with Robert Shiller

Government As Tough Love An Interview with Robert Shiller Dec 16, 2025 Brandon Adams When we observe people fall from grace, we tend to get a dopamine jolt that can

Policy

The Center Should Not Hold

The title of Brandon’s previous post “The Center Can Not Hold” is ripped from the end of the famous TS Elliot poem The Wasteland .

Policy

The Center Cannot Hold

In 1998’s Shut Up and Deal , Jesse May told you all you need to know about the poker world. My book, 2006’s Broke: A Poker Novel, was an afterword.

Filed without a date

The snapshot of this domain kept 48 of these pages without a filing date: the date is in neither the page nor the archive’s own record of it, and the newsroom does not put one there. They are listed here in alphabetical order, outside the dated feed above.

The terms behind the numbers

Deposit beta
The share of a Fed rate move a bank actually passes on to its savers.
Roll decay
What a futures fund loses each month it sells a nearby contract and buys a dearer later one.
Owners’ equivalent rent
The rent a homeowner would pay for their own house — the heaviest single item in the CPI.
CPI-W
The index for urban wage earners and clerical workers: the basket that sets the Social Security raise.
Assessed value
The figure a county uses to tax a house, which is not what a buyer would pay for it.
Special assessment
A one-off charge on owners for work the reserve fund cannot absorb.
Demurrage
The per-day charge for leaving a container inside the terminal past its free time.
Rebasing
Moving a GDP series onto a newer base year — an economy can grow on paper without producing anything new.
Hold
The share of the money wagered that a sportsbook keeps. Hold is revenue; handle is not.