For those who don’t want to try to read about John McCain’s 2 – 1 = 7 calculations, a couple of interesting links. It’s missing the appropriate equations, so I suspect a few of the simplifying assumptions are skewed, and he doesn’t mention that the industry in question has always been at the forefront of […]

The Most Trusted Name in News: Former secretaries of state James Baker III and Warren Christopher say the next time the president goes to war, Congress should be required to say whether it agrees. The co-chairmen of a bipartisan study group have proposed legislation that would require the president to consult lawmakers before initiating combat […]

After all the recent discussion of oil inventories and other arguments about the price of oil I thought I would throw another set of data and thoughts on the subject. This chart compares the price of oil to the CRB Index of industrial commodity prices — an index of 13 major commodities that does not […]

The Automatic Earth notes an article in the WSJ and says: Scores of banks were already suffering headaches by the end of the first quarter, according to a _newsreview by The Wall Street Journal of FDIC-filed reports by 6,919 banks that make construction loans. The smallest banks, those with total assets of less than $5 […]

by rdan The NYT reports: In a speech earlier this year, Christopher Cox, the agency’s chairman, said that working on the transition to international accounting standards and reaching enforcement agreements with foreign countries like the Australians were two of the most important items on his agenda as his term comes to a close. “It is […]

John McCain’s Economic plan.

Hi I am Robert Waldmann. rdan has very kindly invited me to guest post here some. I have a blog of my own (to which he kindly linked in the announcement). I am officially an economist, but tend to blog about politics at my home blog. Here I will try to fit the interest in, […]

Robert Waldmann will be posting on topics. He will post and introduce himself. Here is a link to his site at Robert’s Stochastic thoughts.

Tim Harford (h/t Mark Thoma) presents the old trade-off between Rationality and Cooperation, with a curious parenthetic: Except, nobody really thinks this is the way players would behave in reality. The optimal strategy seems sociopathic; isn’t it worth playing cooperatively in the hope that the other player will do the same thing? (Unlike much real […]

AP reports on a PEW study on immigration and Americans taking jobs or not: The U.S. had 28 million immigrants _ legal and illegal _ age 16 and older in 2000, an increase of 61 percent from 1990. By 2004, there were 32 million. Immigrants tend to be younger and have less education than American […]