by Tilman Tacke and Robert Waldmann We don’t know if someone else has noticed this amazing fact: in a cross country regression, the ratio of public health care spending to GDP is negatively correlated with the infant mortality rate as one would expect, but the share of private health care spending in GDP is positively […]

by cactus Back in January, I had a post entitled Why is the Economy in Trouble? Seriously, Why is the Economy in Trouble?. If I may quote myself extensively (and I may!!): [W]hy is the economy in a state where even rational people are talking about the need for stimulus only a few years after […]

by CoRev and Rdan Let’s compare the two candidates policies, major component by major component. It will not be easy because they are both extensive but modestly detailed. Furthermore, you the reader will have to do some work by reading their plans. So let’s get started with “Energy” because it is, to my mind the […]

In the last installment of this Social Security series we kind of dug into some of the details of unfunded liability, what it was and what it wasn’t and most importantly where the incidence occured: in the past or in the future. Backwards Transfer is Back. In the course of that I think it became […]

Hat tip to Anonymous for the Wapo article. In January 2007, as years of loose mortgage lending were about to send the nation’s housing market into devastating decline, Fannie Mae chief executive Daniel H. Mudd wrote a confidential memo to his board. Discussing the company’s successes, Mudd said one of Fannie Mae’s achievements in 2006 […]

Via Drs. DeLong and Black, the WaPo reports that this version of the S&L crisis will repeat the mistakes of the last one: Instead of giving each company a big capital infusion upfront, the government could make quarterly injections as the companies’ losses warrant, the sources said. This would be an attempt to minimize the […]

CoRev says: Dan, may I suggest an open thread that allow us to list the various policy issues and then discuss them. I would start with:1) Economic2) Energy3) Jobs [and I consider 1,2 & 3 to be closely interlinked]4) Fiscal— Balanced Budget— Taxes5) National Security It is hard to divorce any one policy or subpart […]

Could July have been the bottom in auto sales? Auto sales jumped from 12.6 million in July to 13.7 million in August. Auto sales are nearly 20% below trend as compared to 30% below trend at the 1981 bottom and 16% below trend at the 1991 bottom. So, just maybe July was the bottom.

The NYT reports: WASHINGTON — Senior officials from the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve on Friday called in top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants, and told them that the government was preparing to place the two companies under federal control, officials and company executives briefed on the discussions […]

Steve Waldman graduated Columbia the year after Barack Obama. His brother Mike was Bill Clinton’s chief speechwriter. So when Steve Waldman declared his suspicion that John McCain would get the highest percentage of the Jewish vote of any recent Republican, with a link that indicated it could put Florida solidly in the Republican column, I […]