I have taken to calling the housing market a “bubble”. But how do I define a bubble? A bubble requires both overvaluation based on fundamentals and speculation. It is natural to focus on an asset’s fundamental value, but the real key for detecting a bubble is speculation – the topic of this post. Speculation tends […]

Let’s join William Polley in celebrating the life of Pope John Paul II. We might also mourn his death as we are assured he has now joined the Lord that he served so ably. But no liberal or conservative partisan hack should politicize this Pope – as George will did today when Will compared the […]

Angrybear readers have long enjoyed the comments from Elaine Supkis – so by “new gal”, I’m referring to her new blog: The Bush people plug in numbers hoping to fool people. They admit, if you corner them, their formulas will cause real economic pain…for the working class. They won’t admit that this will be a […]

While Brad provided an advanced copy, Dean and Paul presented their paper with Greg Mankiw providing his comments courtesy of Donald Luskin who for some reason thinks Mankiw devastated the paper by Baker-DeLong-Krugman (BDK). Max Sawicky provides another perspective on the Gunfight at the Brookings Corral as does Brad. Greg might have given a citation […]

Today’s employment report from the BLS was truly disappointing. Most economists had predicted reasonably strong employment growth, of at least 200,000. But it turns out that the US economy only generated half that number of new jobs in March. THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION: MARCH 2005 Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 110,000 in March, and the […]