By Spencer Madoff is awaiting sentencing. It is a reasonable trade-off, 30 to 40 years of life as a multi-billionaire for spending the last 10-15 years of your life in a federal prison. Maybe what the Judge should do is not than sentence him to federal prison.. Rather what he should tell Madoff is that […]

By Spencer, It is interesting how today’s report on nominal retail sales is being ignored almost across the board among the economic bloggers. January and February retail sales are above the December low. The three month moving average is still below the December moving average, but if the March report is decent the very low […]

Robert Waldmann In fact, I agree with DeLong and don’t even have a clear idea who Say was (don’t know his first name do know he wrote before Ricardo). In standard economist speak Say’s law states that output can’t be below the quantity that people want to supply given wages and prices, that aggregate demand […]

by Rusty and cross posted from Health Care Think Tank Latest in Physician Office IT Who will lead the charge to install IT in physician offices? Sam’s Club and Dell. Huh? Sam’s Club will partner with Dell and eClinicWorks for software, hardware, training and maintenance. No joke. The system will integrate patient appointments and billing […]

rdan How to get a human on the phone for company information and service can be had at the linked site.

by Bruce Webb The following three Tables are copied from the Liebman-MacGuineas-Samwick Non-Partisan Social Security Reform Plan to make a couple of points. One is that the plan authors are just not that into you, that is if you are a wage worker seeking a more comfortable retirement. They see crisis from a much different […]

This is a *demand side* argument in favor of Fama’s claim that deficit spending crowds out private spending one for one. My earlier effort was to argue that the aggregate supply curve can be vertical (real aggregate supply is not affected by nominal aggregate dmeand) even when there is involuntary unemployment. I think I get […]

OK It’s Hopeless. Capitalism can’t be saved from investor idiocy Wall Street rallied on Tuesday with the kind of gusto that can only come from the starving. Citigroup (nyse: C – news – people ) Chief Executive Vikram Pandit released a memo on Tuesday saying that the bank had been profitable in the first two […]

by Bruce Webb Andrew Biggs references an editorial from the Charleston SC Post and Courier Advance Entitlements Reform However, President Obama’s major entitlement-reform offensive strikes on the Medicare front. He proposed, in his speech to Congress, to deliver “quality, affordable health care for every American” while also bringing runaway costs under control. That challenging goal […]

By Spencer Required reading: Christina D. Romer of the Council of Economic Advisers Lessons from the Great Depression for Economic Recovery in 2009 I really like her comments on gold, treasury operations and money supply. (hat tip Greg Mankiw)