By Daniel Costello

During recessions, crime tends to rise, especially burglaries and other financial-related offenses. In a big surprise, burglaries are down this year as much as 30% in some cities.

In Los Angeles, the number of burglaries in the first three quarters of 2009 fell 6% compared with 1% during the same period in 2008. In Phoenix, there were 429 fewer burglaries in the first nine months of 2008 -- and 4,000 fewer in the first nine months of this year.

In Boston, the 2,199 burglaries reported in roughly the first nine months of the year is 335 fewer than in the same period last year. In Minneapolis, the number of burglaries reported in roughly the first nine months of the year dropped more than 15 % compared with the same period last year, and more than 25 % compared with that period in 2007.

Continue reading "Surprise: Burglaries Down Despite Downturn" >

By Daniel Costello

Hey everybody: I'm glad to be back at Planet Money and spending the next few months with you. Here's some things that caught our eye today other than the fun Halloween pics circling the office:

Wall Street started the week off in a buoyant mood, after a variety of key economic data came in better than expected this morning. The brightest news came from the Institute for Supply Management, which tracks nationwide factory sentiment. Its closely watched manufacturing index was 55.7 for October. That was up from 52.6 in September and was the best reading since April 2006. Readings above 50 indicate an expansion in industrial activity.

Construction spending for September also rose, up 8%, its biggest gain in a year, while pending home sales for September were up 6.1% as the home buyers tax credit boosted activity.

Meanwhile, Ford surprised everybody -- and probably itself -- by reporting profit of nearly $1 billion in the third quarter North American business this morning and said it would be "solidly profitable" in 2011. The only Detroit automaker to dodge bankruptcy court said positive cash flow of $1.3 billion contrasted with a $7.7 million cash burn a year earlier.

Last but not least, Clorox Co. showed today why not everyone is afraid of a little swine flu: the bleach maker reported net income in the last quarter rose 23% from a year ago, aided by sales of disinfectant wipes to combat the worldwide H1N1 flu virus and lower costs.

By Laura Conaway

Our friends over at Youth Radio filed a report this week on a brother and sister who've worked and scrimped and worked some more and now own houses. It helps to have parents who know how it's done.

"He gave me a huge lecture," Denise Tejada says about her father's intervening in her teenage spending habits. "He analyzed my bills and my checks and how much I was spending on certain extra things that I wanted." The dad put his kids on a savings program so they could afford to break into the depressed real estate market. As Wilmer Tejada says, they might not get another chance like this one for a long time.

Seen in San Francisco. (Steve Rhodes/Planet Money Flickr Pool)

We like to share what we're reading here at Planet Money. Now it's your turn -- here's what you're checking out:

@reneerico sends "Why Capitalism Fails" from the Boston Globe

Colin McKenzie is reading "The M-Shaped Recovery" from the Harvard Business Review

@MLGreis sends "Bouncy Castle Finance" from Foreign Policy Magazine

@MacDivaONA is reading "Ticketmaster Finds Another Way To Cut Out Scalpers" from NYT

Continue reading "Lunch Break Link Roundup " >

By Caitlin Kenney

Planet Money friend Felix Salmon posted this great short film about overdraft fees over on his blog. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to share it here. The short film is part of a larger documentary about predatory lending. Happy lunch break!

Budae jjigae or "army stew" includes hot dogs and spam. (su-lin / Flickr)

Gillian Gutierrez writes:

I have a new alternative economic indicator for you: what cooking websites (Epicurious, Cooks.com) offer as suggestions for ingredients. I just got an email from cooks.com with 6 recipes for HOT DOG dishes. I kid you not! Crown roast of hot dogs and weenie stew included.

When the economy tanks, we start cooking with cheap foods! I guess they'll be no lamb, veal or king crab this season.

Bonus: A recipe for the stew pictured above above.

Has the financial crisis made you afraid of banks? Here's an animated take on writer/economist Stephen Leacock's story of a man who is so intimidated by banks that the second he walks into them, nothing he says comes out right. An oldie, but a goodie, this fun little cartoon comes to us via @thenfb.

Crime and the Times - Arrears from crimeandthetimes on Vimeo.

By Laura Conaway

"I'll never own a thing," Crime and the Times sing on their new album, Arrears. "I've got nothing to give but my debt."

The title track makes even me seem optimistic, and I'm one of the people who has to spend all day looking at lousy economic data. On the other hand, the Recession Generation may have just gotten its Nevermind, its College Dropout. I say may have -- the answer's in the listening, mine and yours.

(Thanks to listener Nolan Hurley for the link.)

Remember those vintage-y Wells Fargo ads, the ones that looked like spin-offs from Little House on the Prairie? The Big Money's Win Rosenfeld (an NPR alum) says you can watch the financial industry evolve through its pitches to you, the consumer.

The 1948 vision of free enterprise.

This pretty amazing AIG commercial is making the rounds at Planet Money. Not sure I'd call it "playing it safe" but we certainly have written lots about AIG!

BONUS: More AIG commercials.

Ashley sends a story about how email logs may provide advance warning of a crisis at a company. Two professors at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne studied messages sent by Enron employees during the year and a half before the company's collapse and found that as the situation worsened, the number of "email cliques" grew.

Daniel in Florida has been reading about the troubles at the U.S. Patent Office. Collections at the office have dropped from $6.9 million a day in January and February to $5.9 million a day last week, and employees are facing a massive backlog.

Meanwhile, Curtis from Minneapolis shares an essay that suggests more young grads may be shunning Wall Street.

If only all food could get 33 percent cheaper. @ceolaf/twitpic

 

Falling prices at a street food cart in New York City.

Thanks to reader @ceolaf for the picture.

Our friends over at Frontline take an extended, gripping look at last fall's near-death experience in American banking, an especially the shotgun wedding of Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. John Thain and Ken Lewis, their respective chiefs, tell the story themselves.

Bonus: Simon Johnson interview.

We'll run Breaking the Bank in full, after the jump.

Continue reading "'Breaking The Bank'" >

May the experimental spaceships rest in peace. Jeffrey Wachs

 

Jeffrey Wachs from Los Angeles listened to Friday's podcast on the space economy and sent us this picture from the Mojave Air and Spaceport, where new space companies are testing their rockets. Nearby is a cool junkyard -- a final resting place for experimental aircraft and spaceships.

The big one is Lehman Brothers. Good and Always With Honor

 

For your lunchtime diversion, check out this great bankruptcy graphic from the folks over at Good. The size of the boats represent each company's pre-bankruptcy assets in billions. (Thanks to Amanda for the link.)

What's cooking. (Enlarge.) Alan Cordova

 

Alan Cordova dialed up the latest stats on what Americans are eating, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And yes, I've got a salt-and-vinegar potato chips problem. Also a Twix one. But after the jump, check out the increase in fat being added to food -- you know, just added in.

Continue reading "Now With More Fat" >

A cyclist works the impossible, with gusto. I love that they left in a few of his failures.

subprime from beeple on Vimeo.

Thanks to @Gordoneats for the link.

The employee fridge at a Commerce Department agency. Jon S.

 

Jon S. sends this little bit of Commerce Department humor from Washington D.C.

Listener Chris Boehm dropped this treat into the comments for the latest podcast. It's a video of a TED Conference talk about how social pressures tighten or loosen morality around the idea of cheating. Chris writes:

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, gave a TED talk that was just posted on YouTube about "cheating."

He talked about experiments he did, where people were given tokens that they could exchange for money, and how their behavior was different than those who were paid money directly.

He then applied this to the stock market: "What happens when you remove things from money?

"Could it be that people would cheat even more? And what happened to the social environment [sic] where people see other people behave around them?"

Jon Stewart's interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer on "The Daily Show" last night is the talk of the "twit-blogs" and the "interscape" this morning.

You may recall that Stewart went after Cramer and his CNBC cohorts last week for giving bad stock tips and missing the big picture in the lead-up to the market's collapse. Last night's TDS was largely given over to an extended conversation between the pair, and Stewart went at Cramer for telling "Mad Money" viewers to take a long view on their investments even as he was aware that the "shenanigans" of heavy-duty investors had turned the market into a minefield.

What did you think? Did Stewart (backed by his studio audience) come off as a bully? Was Cramer's contrition believable or did it come off as staged? Will it change anything about Mad Money? Do you want Cramer as your financial watchdog? The interview as it aired on Comedy Central is above, and you can watch an extended unedited version on The Daily Show website.

If you're the kind of person whose appetite for retribution was whetted rather than satisfied by Bernie Madoff's guilty plea this morning, and if the news of the huge jump in foreclosures has you gunning for banks, we've got a little something for you.

"Drag Me To Hell", a new movie by Sam Raimi, the director of the "Spiderman" and "Evil Dead" trilogies. Hell's plot centers around a young bank employee (Alison Lohman) who forecloses on a home owned by a frail old woman. In response, the crone saddles Lohman with a curse that somehow involves demons, flies in the mouth, mud, bearded dudes with accents and Justin Long. Can you think of better punishment?

Somewhat scary trailer after the jump.

Continue reading "Really Big Payback" >

Ever gotten one of those calls, the one where they say, "Can you come down to HR?"

(Video made by bickerman on Xtranormal: Text-to-Movie)

Our colleague Andrea Seabrook sends along this excerpt from H. L. Mencken's essay "What Is Going On In the World," published in The American Mercury, March, 1933:

The psychic effect of the depression, it seems to me, is generally a good one.... It has taught people the difference between speculative values and real values. It has hastened the death of sick industries, and proved the vigor of sound ones. It has blown up the old delusion that the amount of money in the world is unlimited, and that every American is entitled to a police captain's share of it. Best of all, it has taught millions that there is really no earthly reason why there should be two cars in every garage, and a chicken in the pot every day.

Continue reading "A Word From H.L. Mencken" >

For your reading pleasure, this from The Big Money: Deflation Fears Suck Air out of Markets. Their take is that the drop-off in consumer spending is leading to a fall in prices, which is causing the stock market to make like a rock in midair and fall.

We've got a slightly different take on what's causing the market swoon -- yes, deflation, deflation, deflation -- but a little something else, too. Adam's prepping tape for it on the podcast today.

We're in charge now.

From J-List

 

From the decidedly Not Safe for Work site J-List (the "J" is for Japan) comes this report about a Japanese cat named Tama. It's been named an honorary stationmaster at Kishi Station, in Okayama Prefecture, which J-List writes:

". . . has created a huge spike in popularity for the region as tourists flock to see the cat of the hour and buy his official cat photobook. . . . The popularity of the cat has been credited with bringing millions of yen to the entire prefecture in the form of increased tourist revenue, and the rail company has offered Tama all the cat food he can eat to show their thanks. I can has lifetime employment?"

A homemade history, with Pink Floyd.

Time for a lunch break:

The news cannot get any more weird, because there's just no place to put it. I just looked at CNN.com, and that site is leading with "What Would You Do With $700 Billion?" That's not exactly incisive coverage, but it makes as much sense as any to me.

Personally, I'm wondering if this week has been anything like the Cuban missile crisis. Thoughts, anyone?