In honor of Bruce Webb’s “hibernation” post (and reinvigoration of his own blog), a partial retrospective of his 50-part series (for which some enterprising publisher should contract for a book version): Intergenerational Equity, Unfunded Liability and Selfish Boomers Unfunded Liability Bookended Social Security 2027: A date for action? CBO: Updated Long-Term Projections for Social Security […]
Emanuele Millemaci and Robert Waldmann This paper focuses on two main issues. First, we find that, on average, households’ discount rates decline. This implies dynamically inconsistent preferences. Second, we calculate an indicator of the degree of dynamic inconsistency that may help us to understand how households overcome their self-control problems. We use a micro dataset […]
Perception, per the NYT: Fed Leaves Key Rate Steady as It Worries About Growth Reality: TSLF (Mar 11), PDCF (Mar 16), expanded acceptable collateral pool (multiple times, most recently Monday), loans to the parent from the subsidiaries to cover capital needs.* And it may not be enough. (Of course it’s an AIG link.) There’s more […]
Time for this adopted Angry Bear to go into hibernation for the winter. Events out of Alaska and now out of Wall Street make it extremely unlikely that Social Security itself will return to the center of the policy table anytime soon. Rather than rallying to crush one of the remaining cornerstone’s of the New […]
Floyd Norris lists the Unlucky 13, a.k.a., my portfolio.* Ignoring AIG (of which more later, maybe), here are the top Market Cap losers in the S&P 500 YTD, who combined have dropped by more than half a trillion dollars: EXXON MOBIL GENERAL ELECTRIC MICROSOFT AT&T CITIGROUP BANK OF AMERICA After reading that list, I fully […]
McCain and Obama on Lehman BrothersMcCain: “The crisis in our financial markets has taken an enormous toll on our economy and the American people — first the decline of our housing markets followed by the collapse of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and now Lehman Brothers. I am glad to see that the Federal […]
Lots of material in the speech.
I’m on vacation, but had time to notice with all that is going on in the financial markets nobody noticed that industrial production fell 1.1% in August. Moreover, the June and July data were revised down. This is another observation supporting the analysis that third quarter real GDP growth will be very weak and maybe […]
Kevin Drum asks But here’s a question for one of the serious econ-bloggers out there: Have lots of big non-U.S. banks collapsed? There was Northern Rock, but anyone else? Are any European financial systems in danger of meltdown? Why not? I like to think of myself as a serious econ-blogger, but don’t claim the title […]
AngryBear Commenter Mooser Gives Some Financial Advice When Bush was elected, we paid off the house and took our money out of investments and into insured accounts. I advise others not to do the same. When you have no house payment, you feel like you are living in somebody else’s house. It’s a very anxious […]