by Bruce Webb As Krugman would say: Wonkish. Last Wednesday I put up a post Vanishing the Social Security Surplus which got some push back in comments by Andrew Biggs. So let me back up a little. Social Security surplus is defined in two ways. One is ‘Income less Interest – Cost’. The other is […]

By Spencer The March employment report continued the trend of the last few months with payroll employment down 694,000, about the same as the last few months. This brought the unemployment rae to 8.5% and job loses of some 5.3 million over the past year.The one encouraging item was a repeat of last month where […]

Robert Waldmann is still trying to think of creative was to use CDS to commit fraud. One key use of CDS was to relax capital controls. A debt instrument plus a CDS from AAA rated AIG counted as AAA debt, thus banks could gamble more if they bought a CDS from AIG. Would this still […]

by Bruce Webb Well the Republican Party and economic conservatives generally have made their position clear, they are openly using the current meltdown as an opportunity to kill Medicare and Social Security as they exist today. We saw this at the Stimulus Summit where the very first question by the Republicans, coming from Senate Minority […]

Headline from the Christian Science Monitor: “As G-20 battles protectionism, a cautionary tale in Ecuador” [emphasis mine] Subhead for that same article: “The country has put steep tariffs on an array of goods. Seventeen of the world’s 20 largest economies have broken recent promises not to take protectionist measures.” [emphasis mine] Presumably, the other three […]

rdan Another look at the budget deficit: Discussions of the budget outlook typically begin with the budget “baseline”… In building the baseline, CBO follows rules that … generally assume that current laws affecting taxes and mandatory spending will continue without change. Sometimes, however, current law diverges from current budget policies. This year, the official budget […]

By Spencer, Just checked this years Federal Register. In Team Bush’s final year it was 80,700 pages long, the second highest on record. But now that we have the complete Bush record we find that on average the Register was 75,894 pages over the eight years of his terms. This set a new record for […]

by Bruce Webb A new front was opened Monday in the war on Social Security. The first shot came from Kevin Hassett of AEI who wrote a piece for Bloomberg Recession Bites Into Social Security’s Surplus We have all been so busy whining about bonuses at American International Group Inc. and arguing about the so-called […]

rdan Zero Hedge notes the beginnings of another kind of recovery by the big guys. This paragraph caught my eye. While on one hand it is surprising that NTRS could generate losses on lender arrangements, which traditionally have a 0 lower return bound, what is much more shocking, is that such a large company as […]