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

A Difference in National Priorities

AIG is bankrupt, but Manchester United still wears their logo. However, when Dutch bank DSB Bank NV filed bankruptcy, Stephen Colbert had to step in to sponsor U.S. Speedskating? Maybe the Dutch understand Sports Economics and the Americans don’t?* *J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, Skip Sauer, to name just three, would dissent from the last statement. […]

Ultra Amateurish Thoughts on “Optimal Fiscal Policy in a Liquidity Trap (Ultra-Wonkish)”

Paul Krugman argued that optimal fiscal policy in a liquidity trap targets unemployment equal to the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). He uses a model with Ricardian equivalence. This means that the public debt does not affect consumption. When he wrote his post, I said I thought his conclusion depended on this assumption. […]

Vague Thoughts on The Theory of the Firm, the Business Cycle and Kurt Vonnegut

Robert Waldmann Don’t say you weren’t warned. I am trying to understand the effects of the switch from mechanically controlled machine tools to electronically controlled machine tools and then to digitally controlled machine tools. I don’t really know much about machine tools, but, then again, I don’t know much about firms or the business cycle […]

HR676: Serious policy? or Simple political posturing?

by Bruce Webb A lot of progressives insist that there is a simple golden-bullet solution to the health care crisis. All we need to do is substitute the 30 page HR676 Single Payer/Medicare For All bill for the 1990 page HR3962. Which led me to ask “How can you possibly supply code language to overhaul […]

This is What a Giant Vampire Squid Looks Like

Via Greg Mitchell’s Twitter feed, lying isn’t just for the IB branch any more: Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman’s then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003. Unable to identify a […]

Are exporters in Asia real-ly losing their competitive edges?

by Rebecca Central banks across Asia are concerned and actively engaged in some kind of currency manipulation – direct intervention, quasi-capital controls, and/or public speech (I will refer to this later, but RGE published a great article to the fact) – as investors flock to global capital markets seeking the “risk-on” trade. Central banks are […]