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

Employment report

Even with the drop in employment the new data really does not add much new information to what we knew a month ago. Interestingly hours worked rose this month. But the first quarter average is 107.4 as compared to 107.7 last quarter. This gives you about a 1.1% quarterly drop–seasonally adjusted annual rate — for […]

One Ring, to rule them all

The Chicago Tribune carries this story: New Orleans – If you think the prescription drug you took for headaches caused your heart attack, the Food and Drug Administration says you can’t sue the maker for injury if it met agency standards.The Consumer Product Safety Commission says you can’t sue a mattress maker if your mattress […]

45 trillion credit swap market…how big is that?

The ABX.HE index, which is based on credit default swaps on different tranches of subprime mortgage-backed securities. (Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland) Hat tip to Jim Satterfield for this link to Marketplace public radio. Bob Moon is the Senior Business Correspondent. MOON: OK, I’m about to unload some numbers on you here, so I’ll speak […]

About funding education

From Rdan’s Sallie Mae post I got the urge to hunt because vtcodger mentioned greed. Greed? Yes, I have recently learned that one person who works to manage the endowment fund for Harvard got a bonus for last year performance that was less than the year before of $2M. Imagine that! The endowment is so […]

Sallie Mae couldn’t have predicted…Model Validation Part 3

Higher Ed Watch reports on Sallie Mae: Last week, we wrote that Sallie Mae and its promoters on Wall Street claim the company was “blind-sided” by the rising default and delinquency rates on subprime private loans it made to low-income and working class students at poor performing higher education trade schools. It’s a convenient argument […]

Bank risk models and regulation

Here is Avinash Persaud, writing on Willem Buiter’s blog, with his take on the problem: Why Bank Risk Models Failed and the Implications for what Policy Makers Have to Do Now, by Avinash D. Persaud: Sir Alan Greenspan, and others have questioned why risk models, which are at the centre of financial supervision, failed to […]

Wild women of the sphere

I will let people know how many google hits we get for this post. On the other hand, digby at Hullabaloo recommends we vote.

Reality going to the Dogs

This one is for those concerned about how we spend our tax dollars. It is a robotics project funded by the pentagon performed by Boston Dynamics called the BigDog. I’m not going to comment because I can think of many positives as in the moon shot program and transitors and I can think of many […]

Angry Bear on the rise

Angry Bear has been steadily increasing its readership, but in the last three months especially has seen a significant rise in visits. For the first time ever we had over 100,000 visits in March, which is a milestone given that around 60,000 was common. (Real figures can be evaluated on the sitemeter. January saw 90,000, […]

Peltzman Effect

If you look at the data on traffic deaths it is obvious that we are doing something right in the US.As far back as the data goes traffic deaths have been falling at a -3.2% annual rate. But if your source of information was economics you would be hard pressed to know this. It has […]