What, am I crazy? Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts is probably a doubtful start for the rest of the 2011 season, and perhaps has made his last start of his Colts career (The Colts would owe Manning $28 million if they exercised his contract for another year at the end of 2011 - crazy to think about). He is also due to make at a minimum $23.4 million this year - $20 million as a signing bonus for his new contract and $3.4 million in guaranteed salary. Luckily I left myself an out - the problem with painting every sports contract with the "overpaid" brush is there is an army of athletes who will never touch the salaries which make us do a double take. As Frédéric Bastiat wrote in his essay What is Seen and What is Not Seen, "Let us accustom ourselves, then, not to judge things solely by what is seen, but rather by what is not seen."This article requires a special shout-out to Nelson Smith at Financial Uproar who planted the seed - sorry I waited until the third week of NCAA football to write this!

Carnivals and featured links for the week!

We recently covered a lot of the fallout from Standard and Poor's recent downgrade of the debt of the United States. The United States has 50 states which also issue their own debt, and get their own credit rating from the credit ratings firms. Luckily (this time) the legwork has been done, and I'm able to just link you to the primary source, the Tax Foundation! So view on to see the credit ratings of the states.

Here at DQYDJ, we retrieved Standard & Poor's AAA 'Domestic Ratings' for sovereign debt on the morning of 8/11/2011.  Here's  the list of 'AAA' rated sovereign debt issuers you have already seen at our site: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Isle of Man, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.  We told you the other day that the only thing that really matters is the yield - the price at which a sovereign can issue debt.  Let's dig into that further!

DQYDJ: surprising our readers with yet another week where we submit articles to a carnival!  Maybe we'll keep it going this time.

It's been two full market days since S&P cut the debt rating of the United States one notch from AAA to AA+... and for one day at least, it was looking like S&P had the stock market by the nose.  Two days later we can finally take a look back at what happened since we've had two trading days, a rest in between, a Federal Reserve statement, and a speech from the President.  To wit: the S&P 500 Index closed at 1199.38 on Friday, 1119.46 on Monday and 1172.53 on Tuesday.

Check out our carnival entries and featured links for the week!

How much does noise affect real estate prices? Ever wonder how much better a house would be if it wasn't […]

I recently purchased my first house here in the Bay Area, and I did it in a decidedly non-traditional way.  For a few years I had been reading about a smaller real estate company known as Redfin which operated in a more hands-off way than a normal real estate firm.  Redfin leverages technology and a slick user interface to help its users (most of which will not use Redfin to buy a home, but the search feature is that good) find homes on their own.  Once a house is purchased, Redfin actually refunds some of the brokerage commission.  In most places, 3% of the purchase prices goes to the seller's agent, 3% to the buyers, and 1.5%, 50% of Redfin's commission, goes back to the end user.  So... what's the catch?

Serious Thinkers™ in all corners of the web return to some common themes, even when those themes are currently out of the public spotlight. Recently, those Serious Thinkers™ have been reading between the lines on topics which the public has moved on from - the effect of the minimum wage on unemployment, and even more to the point, the effect of the minimum wage on specific segments of the population. And why shouldn't they? The current official unemployment rate is 9.2%, but the official unemployment rate among those with a Bachelor's Degree or higher is a relatively healthy 4.4%.