The Downside of Low Interest Rates   In today’s commentary Stephen Roach takes on the subject of low real interest rates.  His argument is that by keeping real interest rates so low for so long (short term real rates have actually been negative for a couple of years now) in order to stimulate the economy, the […]

Read Me Kash wrote a great post on Saturday, which tends to be a slower traffic day. Then I came along and wrote a bunch of long posts, pushing his down the page. So if you haven’t already read it, make sure to check out Kash’s Anti-Terrorism History Repeating Itself? post. In other news, Sometime […]

CalPundit’s Challenge CalPundit looks at wage growth for workers and CEOs and issues this challenge: Odd, then, that CEO pay rose 27% in 2003, isn’t it? Did the supply of CEOs shrink last year? Did demand skyrocket? What’s more, compared to average workers, who remain stuck in the invisible grip of Adam Smith, CEO pay […]

Economics and Replicability The key element of any true empirical result is replicability. If a result is not reproducible, then the purported effect was almost surely the result of either random chance, error, or fraud. This is not limited to the social sciences, of course. Two fairly famous incidents from the natural sciences highlight the […]

Clear Channel Entertainment Compares Bush to Hitler    You may recall the castigation MoveOn.org recieved after two entries to its Bush in Thirty Seconds ad contest compared Bush to Hitler. For the record, the entries were simply uploaded to MoveOn’s site without any screening; when MoveOn was alerted to the entries in question, they were […]

Typos Are Fine Apparently, the human eye and brain don’t really care what order the letters of a word are in: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit […]

Anti-Terrorism History Repeating Itself?   The FBI is apparently adopting some new tactics in the fight against terror.  From a front page story in today’s Washington Post: Interviews Of Muslims To Broaden FBI Hopes to Avert a Terrorist Attack   FBI agents have launched a series of interviews of Muslims and Arab Americans in the […]

Sloppy Reporting from the New York Times   The New York Times is having difficulty correctly reporting the results of their own poll today.  The headline of the article reads “No Poll Boost from Edwards.”  Yet the poll results show the Kerry/Bush numbers (including Nader as an option) changing from 42/ 43 to 45/42 between […]

Kerry’s Cabinet Bruce Bartlett, a conservative columnist for The National Review, ponders who should comprise the economic team in a Kerry cabinet. Typically, I disregard or at least heavily discount advice from conservatives on what Democrats should do. For example, conservative NYT columnist David Brooks often waxes on about what Democrats should do to appeal […]

New Inflation Data   Yesterday’s PPI release and today’s CPI release from the BLS suggest that the growth in inflation (excluding the effects of oil prices) may already be tapering off in the economy.  Prices of producer fell in June thanks to lower energy prices, while consumers continued seeing higher prices for both energy and […]