OK, my apologies for the clownish way of spelling “contradict”, but if we read Larry’s latest, you’ll realize he did not at all challenge Kash: Three months ago the first government estimate of gross domestic product for the fourth quarter of 2004 came in at 3.1 percent at an annual rate. At the time, the […]

It’s time for “fair and balanced” so we’ll let Donald Luskin tell us why Bush’s proposal makes sense by noting two of his posts today. In one, he noted a couple of privatization principles: Replace The Empty Promises Being Made to Younger Workers With Real Money. Younger workers should have the option of putting a […]

As we congratulate Duncan Black for correctly calling that Bush would endorse the Pozen plan, let’s review how George Bush defined the Social Security problem: Congress also needs to address the challenges facing Social Security. I’ve traveled the country to talk with the American people. They understand that Social Security is headed for serious financial […]

You know that people are a bit on edge regarding China’s exchange rate policy when this story is one of the top news items (at least as of 1pm EDT) on the Financial Times: China says no change in monetary policy China’s renminbi currency traded briefly outside its tightly controlled band on Friday, triggering a […]

Apparently, February’s incredibly low savings rate was not the bottom for the US, because in March it went even lower. Since I’m in a charty kind of mood today, here’s the picture… (Note: the bump at the end of 2004 is due to Microsoft’s one-time dividend payout in December.) This incorporates the most recent data […]

So what’s the deal with inventories, anyway? You may have been wondering a bit about that in the wake of yesterday’s GDP report, in which inventory changes played such an important role; one-third of economic growth in the first quarter of 2005 was simply due to firms building up their stocks of inventories. Studying inventory […]

Back in 2003, Bruce Bartlett criticized the Smetters-Gokhale use of present value analysis but now he seems to like such calculations. To be fair, I have used such calculations, while Max Sawicky notes that they look like ginned-up large numbers unless put in the context of the present value of future GDP over the same […]

Are you tired of having the radical right preach to us about what God allegedly wants in the political arena? Tax Analysts reports on this story from Sierra Leone: Tax officials in Sierra Leone offended the country’s Christian population after launching an advertising campaign on April 25 that claimed that Jesus Christ wanted them to […]

This morning the BEA reported that its advance estimate of GDP growth in the beginning of 2005 came in somewhat below expectations, which were for about 3.5% growth: Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate […]

In my view, CalculatedRisk is the blog’s leading authority on the housing market. Having read the latest from John Tamny, James Grant’s Forbes article is something we might all read as well. But Tamny disagrees with Mr. Grant’s assertion that higher interest rates tend to reduce the value of houses: Though the prime-lending rate rose […]