John Tamny wants to remind Lawrence Lindsey about the Hume Specie Flow Model: To begin, just as Chinese authorities fix the yuan’s value, so too do U.S. authorities fix the dollar’s value. As the Journal’s George Melloan noted in a recent editorial, “no currency actually ‘floats.’” As opposed to commodities set by market forces, currencies […]
Donald Luskin praises Treas. Sec. Snow with the following: I’ve come to believe that John Snow is doing a terrific job. Since he was nominated by the president in January 2003, he has been at the center of the Bush administration’s best economic initiatives. In his first months in office, he helped push through the […]
The Department of State’s July 9, 2003 continues to be discussed in the PlameGate matter. The latest is from the New York Sun article entitled “No Hint Seen in Memo that Plame’s Role Was Secret”: Contrary to published reports, a State Department memorandum at the center of the investigation into the leak of the name […]
Sensible and honest conservative Bruce Bartlett emails me the latest nonsense from Deroy Murdock: Modest legislation to extend President Bush’s tax cuts for two years, rather than make them permanent, is trapped in a House-Senate conference committee. Such inaction might be understandable if tax cuts actually “ballooned the deficit,” as tax hikers always charge. In […]
The spot price for Cushing, OK WTI just hit $70 per barrel. Edit: Spot prices were briefly above $70 last year due to Hurricane Katrina. Click on graph for larger image. Dr. Nouriel Roubini suggests that $70 oil may have a significant impact on the US economy: ” … if oil prices were to drift […]
Thomas Nugent coins a new term – Graham-Schumer-push inflation only after he tells us that the labor market is wonderful: Heretofore, the gloom-and-doom crowd fixated on the slow creation of jobs during this economic cycle and on the idea that outsourcing and illegal immigration were combining to steal American jobs. But at the current unemployment […]
On March 31, David Altig discussed this paper by Stephanie Aaronson, Bruce Fallick, Andrew Figura, Jonathan Pingle and William Wascher: On balance, the results suggest that most of the decline in the participation rate during and immediately following the 2001 recession was a response to business cycle developments. However, the continued decline in participation in […]
While I profess to being a Keynesian economist, I have never bought into the notion that fiscal stimulus is the only way to reverse a recession. Max Sawicky – who may be more Keynesian than yours truly – writes: My question in all this, which no conservatives are rushing to answer, is this: What sequence […]
This is one of those milestones (in some ways like the Dow breaching 10,000) that obviously means nothing from a strictly financial point of view, but is an important psychological threshold. If nothing else, this news draws our attention to the real story, which is the slow but steady upward march of interest rates that […]
Bruce Bartlett has been invited to contribute to the National Review: The question is ambiguous because it is not clear whether people are being asked about the effective rate of taxation (taxes as a share of income) or the marginal rate of taxation (that which applies to the last dollar earned). But either way, taxes […]