This is getting a bit surreal: both Clusterstock and Dealbreaker are now phoning up Charlie Gasparino asking for his reaction to my tweets. It’s clearly time for me to go on holiday. So I’m off to Spain, back November 4. If you don’t expect any blogging between now and then, you won’t be disappointed.

I’m going to be offline for most of today, spending it instead downtown installing pirate flags at the South Street Seaport. The opening is at 4pm tomorrow (yes, I know it’s Rosh Hashanah, but it’s also International Talk Like A Pirate Day) in Cannon’s Walk, which even the lifelong New Yorkers among you probably never knew existed. It would be wonderful to see you all there, but if you can’t make the opening then just pop down to the Seaport at any point over the next month. It’s not just for tourists! And I can assure you that the whole pirate project is going to look spectacular. Yaargh!

On Friday, I posted a chart which I thought showed donations to Harvard University rising substantially over the past couple of years, to over $1.6 billion a year. Boy was I wrong. As the Crimson reports, Harvard received $602 million in gifts this past fiscal year—an 8 percent year-on-year decline.

My commenters picked up on the mistake very quickly, but unfortunately I missed those comments: I rushed to meet Bob Millman for wine that afternoon, and then disappeared off to a wedding for most of the weekend, and by the time I got back the comments on the Harvard post were quite far down the list. Which is no excuse: I really should have been on top of this.

So many apologies for not updating the post in a timely manner, and for not paying enough attention to my astute and perspicacious commenters. You guys are the best, and I definitely screwed this one up.

The bad news is that the NYC xkcd book party is happening on the same day as the opening for my wife’s super-cool pirate project at the South Street Seaport. The good news, however, is that (a) the number of tickets to the book party is strictly limited; that (b) it probably won’t start until well after 6pm, when the pirate opening will have ended; and (c) the pirate opening is free, which, if Chris Anderson is to be believed, gives it an unbeatable advantage.

So, if you’re going to the xkcd book party, or if you’re not, do make sure to rock up at Cannon’s Walk at 4pm on Saturday. I’ll be there, and Michelle will be too, and I think various other members of the Reuters commentary team might turn up as well. Hope to see you there!

Let’s say you have two apples. You’re scared of losing those apples, and you want to be sure that they’re absolutely safe. So you give them to the government, and in return the government promises to give you back two apples in a year’s time. You’re happy, and the government gets to eat your apples today, not worrying about paying you back until this time next year. So the government’s happy too. This is known as a “flat yield curve”, and it tends to happen when the economy is depressed and the general mood is rather grim.

Let’s say you have two apples. They’re delicious, and abundant, and you reckon that if you eat them now you’ll be full of vim and vigor and will have the wherewithal to find lots more apples if and when you need them in the future. So before you give the government your two apples today, the government needs to promise to give you back three apples in a year’s time. This is known as a “steep yield curve”, and it tends to happen when people are more optimistic about the future.

Caroline Baum says — rightly — that looking at the yield curve is a much better way of predicting the future than listening to economists. (Which isn’t saying much.) Right now, the yield curve is steepening quite dramatically, which Baum reckons constitutes a sign that “a proliferation of green shoots calmed investor fears of an endless dark winter”.

And what is Baum talking about when she says that between 2006 and 2008 the yield curve was inverted? Well, in cases like that, the yield curve is like a bowl of fruit. It’s great right now, and it’s a lovely day outside, and you’re rather hungry, and you have a bottle of Champagne open, and so if the government wants to take your fruit off you now and give you back a fresh bowl in a week’s time, that fresh bowl is going to have to be substantially bigger than the one you’ve got today.

On the other hand, if the government wants to swap your bowl of fruit today for an identically-sized and just as tasty bowl of fruit all the way out on Christmas Day, then you’d be more interested. You know it’s going to be cold at Christmas, and you know that you’re really going to value that fruit a lot, because fruit won’t be as abundant then as it is now.

So while the yield curve is steep between now and one week, it’s flat between now and Christmas. That’s known as an “inverted yield curve”, and it’s often a sign that things are going to get worse.

On which note I’m going to sign off for the rest of the week. There might be the occasional posting, but nothing regular: I plan to be stomping around fields in Vermont and admiring lines on walls in North Adams. No major bank failures while I’m gone, you hear?

It’s my first day at work! After working from home for substantially all of this decade, it’s a strange feeling; I wonder how long it’ll take to get used to it.

A quick note of introduction for the rather enormous number of reuters.com readers who’ve never heard of me: I’ve just moved my finance blog here after two years at Portfolio.com. I’ll be blogging the financial meltdown here in much the same way as I was over there, if maybe with a slightly more global outlook. But there will be room for other stuff, too: art and architecture, food and wine, demographics and development. Whatever catches my eye, really. So do feel free to suggest blogworthy material — my email address is felix.salmon at thomsonreuters — and let me know if you want me to cite you if the suggestion ends up in a blog entry.

In a weird way, this job means the culmination of a decade-long full-circle journey. In 1999 I got my first blogging gig (although it wasn’t called that at the time) at a little-known newswire called Bridge News. I would link to news stories on the wire, add snarky commentary, and do the whole thing on a fixed page in reverse chronological order. But there was very little conversation: in order to leave a comment, you basically needed to pick up the phone and call me.

My first blogs on the internet were tentative things, but by the time blogging really took off in 2003, I was up and running with both felixsalmon.com (my personal blog) and memefirst.com (a group blog). Meanwhile, I was learning a lot about international finance by writing about Latin America for Euromoney, the financial trade magazine. That’s how I first met NYU professor Nouriel Roubini: at the time we were both very interested in sovereign debt restructuring, and somehow after he started up his economics information aggregator, RGE Monitor, I persuaded him to give me a job blogging there.

That job led to the Portfolio gig, and thence back to a newswire, where it all started. My main job now is just to continue blogging as have been for the past couple of years — but I’m also going to be involved in setting up a brand-new commentary and opinion website, set slightly apart from reuters.com, which will be launching later this year. In the meantime, I get to go swimming in the astonishing pool of information which is owned by Thomson Reuters, and blog anything I find there — something which is very exciting indeed, since finding things like bond spreads and commodity price history on the internet is decidedly non-trivial.

As for the biographical stuff, I’m an Englishman who’s made New York my home: I’ve lived here for the past 12 years, and can’t imagine leaving. I’m still 36, for a few more weeks. And I’m very much looking forward to getting to know, through the comments section, all the new readers I’m going to find through blogging at reuters.com. Welcome to the new blog!

As of April 1; Jeff has the story.

I’ll do my best to answer any questions you might have, but nothing much should change about the blog bar the URL, and in no way should this reflect badly on Portfolio.com, which has been an absolutely wonderful home to me for the past two years and which I’m genuinely sad to be leaving. Some things, however, are just too exciting to resist. More anon.

Reprinted from Portfolio.com