By Spencer, Third quarter nonfarm productivity rose at a 9.5% annual rate as output rose 4.0% and hours worked fell at a 5.0% rate. Historically, productivity has been a very good leading indicator of real GDP growth lagged two quarters. Productivity is also highly cyclical and the first year of a recovery typically experiences the […]
Rdan Steve Waldman at Interfluidity has written an impression of The financial blogger meeting with senior Treasury officials of last Monday. He also provides links to other main posts by those who attended. It is worth a visit.
by Bruce Webb Last evening the CBO Director Blog announced the release of a score of the Boehner amendment: A Preliminary Analysis of a Substitute Amendment to H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act. The results are not impressive: (as always click to enlarge)The amendment is scored at reducing the deficit by $68 […]
Rdan The National Academy of Social Insurance report on options for Social Security is public and now available in pdf form. “The purpose of this report is to help analysts and policymakers consider options to bring Social Security into long-term balance in ways that also address concerns about benefit adequacy.” One cannot simply glance through […]
Common Sense Health Care Reform and Affordability Act Haven’t begun to read it. And somehow it is in a format that doesn’t allow cutting and pasting the text. So I am just throwing this out to the floor for open discussion in comments.
Rdan Yves Smith describes a meeting she attended at Treasury in D.C. Read at her place or the rest under the fold. The Treasury invited a small group of bloggers for a “discussion” with senior officials on Monday. Initially, the meeting was to be background, which is a sort of journalistic “FYI but you can’t […]
by Linda Beale Part of the reason for our ongoing Great Recession is that we have had so many measures in the tax code to favor home ownership that (i) banks started to think of mortgage securitization business as money growing on trees and (ii) homeowners started to think of their homes as money-growing trees. […]
by cactus The Rule of Capture and Legalized Theft The rule of capture states that a resource belongs to the entity that, well, captured it, regardless of where that resource originated. In the US, it tends to apply to oil and natural gas development. What the rule of capture implies is that if you and […]
Mish sends us to “Track the Money,” recovery.gov’s breakdown of where funds have been sent and spent. He’s not happy, but I suspect he’s suffering the Jared Bernstein Problem: only looking at one side of the equation. But—and this is the key “but”—the reason it is right to do that is that ARRA money has […]