One Reason Why a Weak Dollar May Not Help the Trade Deficit This morning the BLS released an interesting tidbit of data: The price index for overall imports rose for the third consecutive month, rising 0.2 percent in December. From December 2002-December 2003, the index was up 1.9 percent, which followed a 4.2 percent increase […]

Previewing Bush’s Budget What do you get when you put together Bush’s idea of a building a manned base on Mars, his stated intention of making the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, and his stated goal of halving the budget deficit by 2009? Take a look at this post on The American Street for […]

More on O’Neill From Reuters this morning: Speaking on NBC’s “Today” show, the ex-Treasury Secretary said the documents were given to him by the Treasury’s chief legal officer after he requested them to help former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind write a book on O’Neill’s time in the Cabinet. “I said to him (the […]

The American Street Is it possible that my earlier link to the latest and coolest group blog, The American Street, was somewhat self-serving? Visit The American Street throughout the day and find out! AB P.S. The list of contributors now includes Jeralyn Merritt, Dave Niewert, Colorado Luis, Skippy, Dave Johnson, Mary Ratcliff, Mark Kleiman, Kevin […]

Rove’s Payback Begins Well, that didn’t take long: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury has asked the U.S. inspector general’s office to investigate how a possibly classified document appeared on Sunday in a televised interview of ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, a department spokesman said on Monday. As you may know, O’Neill provided 19,000 documents to […]

Follow-up to the Unemployment Rate Puzzle AB pointed to a line of thinking that suggests that increasing numbers of people on disability may be contributing to the fall in the labor force participation rate (LFPR) that I pointed out the other day in a post on The Unemployment Rate Puzzle. Among the excellent comments on […]

Kash’s Call #3: A Financial Crisis in the US? My third prediction: there will not be a major financial crisis this year in the US, a la Argentina.(*) Why not? Many of the ingredients for serious financial problems are in place for the US right now: massive government borrowing with no realistic prospect of future […]

More Unemployment In an earlier post Kash gave some data on declining labor force participation, a decline that is particularly sharp among men and people with a high school degree or more education. We don’t really have an explanation for the pattern, though one theory is that people are going back to school — basically […]

If Only For Eagles fans and more importantly, for those who dislike Rush Limbaugh, be sure to click here and then watch the “Frank’s Picks: Divisional Playoffs” video segment. Watch to the end. Via Atrios, who I suspect is very happy today. AB

Completely and Utterly Damaging And depressing, too (but unlikely to be devastating.) That’s my take after watching Leslie Stahl interview former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and author Ron Suskind. It looks like O’Neill gave Suskind every document he had, including transcripts of cabinet and NSC meetings. Other anonymous top officials apparently followed suit. The forthcoming […]