Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

The MA experiment

The Boston Globe has uncovered data showing that the amount insurance companies reimburse hospitals in Massachusetts can vary dramatically from hospital to hospital. Private insurance data obtained by the Globe’s Spotlight Team show that the Brigham [& Women’s Hospital], Mass[achsetts] General, Children’s Hospital[, all in Boston,] and a few others are, on average, paid about […]

Revisiting an Early Look at the Recession

by cactus Revisiting an Early Look at the Recession Now that the recession is officially here, I’d like to revisit a post I wrote in March entitled How is This Recession Not Like Other Recessions?. In it, I note the following: So in terms of politics… what we see is that the Fed is much […]

Three Charts in a Tangle: What Lending?

UPDATE: Credit where due category: H/T to Felix Salmon for pointing to this chart at bignose.org, which gives you borrowings relative to GDP. I often hate line graphs, especially when they include outliers that skew the axis, making it virtually unreadable. (This may be a result of seeing several papers this semester with Chilean/US$ exchange […]

Social Security Monthly Balances: Oct update

Projecting the long-term health of Social Security is of necessity subject to uncertainty, the known unknowns if you will. But you can if you like sample the short term health by consulting Treasury’s Monthly Trust Fund Reports which gives balances to the penny with a one month lag, and compare them to the various projections […]

My Essential Blogs

by cactus My Essential Blogs Most of us who read blogs have blogs we read regularly. Of those, there might be a handful we consider essential. That list is different for each of us, and no doubt changes over time for each of us. Last week, I learned what my current list of essential blogs […]

Smaller banks still making loans

Boston Globe reports on local conditions for small businesses: Even as consumer loans become harder to get, many small businesses in Massachusetts report they are still able to borrow money. In Franklin, Stephen Dunn, president of design and manufacturing firm Core Concepts Inc., says Benjamin Franklin Bank has invited him to renew his $1 million […]

Canadian Content

There are three regular AB posters who currently are residents of the Great White North. So, naturally, it’s a Brooklyn boy who breaks the news that a plurality is not always a majority: The Liberals and New Democrats signed an agreement on Monday to form an unprecedented coalition government, with a written pledge of support […]

NBER generally gets it right

Brad DeLong suggested a bit before the U.S. election that there was virtually no non-political reason for NBER not to admit the United States was in a recession.* A little late, but they generally got it right. As Floyd Norris notes: The National Bureau of Economic Research said today that the current recession began a […]

Now for something completely different

Kevin Drum incidentally mentioned the Nov 1940 collapse of ‘Galloping Gertie’, otherwise known as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, in a post about a new technique about generating electricity from river or ocean currents. Which led me to pull up some footage and figure out how to embed it. (No it is not hard. But Old […]