The Numbers in the News

Numbers that count 2 Two major central banks — the Bank of Japan and the People’s Bank of China — were the only ones not to raise interest rates this year, as inflation threatened economic growth and sapped consumer purchasing power. Central banks have collectively increased rates by more than 70 percent in 2022, according to LPL Financial, with the same goal: raise borrowing costs to cool rising prices that have been hitting shoppers from London to Poughkeepsie. Many were following the Fed, which increased its prime lending rate to…

Clamping Down on ‘Spiritual Opium’

Which he did not (although he did not embarrass himself either). What Clegg claimed in his post, “What The Wall Street Journal Got Wrong,” was hard to argue with: that Facebook’s challenges are complex and that the people at Facebook working on them are trying really hard, so give them a friggin’ break. Who can argue with that? No one, since no one is asserting that Facebook is Thanos. Still, he persisted: “These stories have contained deliberate mischaracterizations of what we are trying to do, and conferred egregiously false motives…