Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Department of Education becomes major lender to students

The Washington Post reports: With scores of lenders unable to come up with money to provide student loans, the Department of Education is preparing to exercise broad new powers in the coming weeks that could fundamentally recast how millions of students pay for college. This initiative could transform the federal government from a guarantor of […]

STOCK MARKET VALUATION

A few days ago in a post on Greg Mankiw we got into a discussion of stock market valuation where vtcouger wondered about using 10 year trailing earnings to evaluate stocks. vtcouger wondered why Benjamin Graham recommended using 10 year trailing earnings rather then one year trailing earnings. Remember, Benjamin Graham was writing in the […]

Unused oil drilling permits: 9300

Watching Cspan at lunch of the House debt on taxes and energy Rep Emanual stated there are currently 9300 unused oil drilling permits in the US. The counter to the statement was from Rep McCrery: There must be a reason for them being unused. Yes, obviously if they are unused there is a reason. Any […]

How to Devalue Your Brand, Greg Mankiw Version

Greg Mankiw, clearly distracted by his former collaborator’s wife having been denied a tenured position at Harvard, quotes Fred Bergsten in the WSJ, Instapundit-style: By effectively killing “fast track” procedures that guarantee a yes-or-no vote on trade agreements within 90 days, lawmakers in Washington, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have destroyed the credibility of […]

Another whittling the beak

By ilsm Carlyle Group just bought Booz Allen Hamilton which does $3.5 (about $5B total corporate revenues) a year “consulting” for DoD. Now Carlyle owns the consultants who will “advise” the DoD to keep to the “strategy and structure” of the think tanks and support investing in more and more potentially useless things from companies […]

Right to know bill out of committee

Healthy Rivers, my favorite blog for such matters, reports that: Congress just moved a little closer to establishing your right to know for sewage spills. Last Thursday, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted to pass the Sewage Right to Know bill (HR 2452) and send it to the full House for consideration. The bill […]

Social Security Zero: the Basics Revisited & Three Myths

Or perhaps we could call this ‘Social Security basics as seen by Bruce’. In any event. Some recent e-mail exchanges and comments have led me to conclude that there are certain misconceptions about Social Security finance, misconceptions that both feed on and feed into certain pernicious myths initiated by people who oppose Social Security on […]

Capital gains increase will change investor behavior? Nah.

Bloomberg has a poll that takes a look at rational investor behavior, with which I am very familiar, over the panic behavior laid out by our conservative ideologues over touching capital gain taxes of any percentage. If the monied sloshers are as sensitive as they imply, maybe they aren’t so rational, and are actually in […]

Greg Mankiw Gives Us Another Reason to Scream "Yours!"

I think he may believe it’s good news that the S&P 500 forward valuation (what we believe we might make next year, having nothing necessarily to do with current earnings or actual sales) has returned, approximately, to the level of 1998.* The problem, as I noted more than two years ago, is that, even ignoring […]