Some blogs suggest a topic when posting open threads. Should this be tried? And who has a list? Of course, some should simply be open.

With today’s (well, yesterday’s) five closings, the total of failings of U.S. banks since March of last year to 69. Of those, slightly more than 20% (14) are from the state of Georgia. Excepting the much larger California, there have been more failings in Georgia than in any two other states combined. Also as a […]

rdan Reader Jack sends this link to Michael Jackson’s death: This is the best commentary on Michael Jackson that you’re likely to read. That’s only because it’s not written by a member of the media, but a well educated and well intentioned person instead. From: Informed Comment by Juan Cole: Michael Jackson’s sad death at […]

Our findings do not provide much support for the usefulness of monetary aggregates in forecasting inflation. See more at the St. Louis Fed. Did building realistic macroeconomic models just get a touch more difficult?

When I first heard that Michael Jackson died, I thought immediately of Chuck Sullivan. I met him once, probably in the early 1990s, after his sponsorship of The Jacksons’s Victory tour savaged his fortune. Unlike the other Moguls I Have Seen, it seemed his reversal of fortune impacted his mood. (More likely, I just caught […]

Dear Barry: The need for posts such as this one recurs because the large majority of economists are idiots. (Multiple exceptions noted—but not enough to change the truth of the initial statement.) As the regulatory reform report notes (quoted by PK at the last link above): In fact, enforcement of CRA was weakened during the […]

by Bruce Webb Congressional Budget Office Long Term Budget OutlookDiscuss. (Social Security is chapter 3) (Update) Not a lot of meat here. CBO offers two outlooks for Social Security, one which projects a payroll gap of 1.33% (extended baseline) and another 1.54%. (alternative fiscal scenario). The former assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts […]

by reader ilsm GAO Testimony 09-969T, On Cost and Performance of the V-22 Osprey. “Availability challenges also impacted the MV-22. In Iraq, the V-22’s mission capability (MC) and full-mission capability (FMC) rates fell significantly below required levels as well as rates achieved by legacy helicopters.6 The V-22 MC minimum requirement is 82 percent, with an […]

Via Eszter, there is one thing that is very clear from this graphic (duplicated below because I can’t figure out how to embed it): There is an excess of home-based internet capacity in the United States, for which people are definitionally paying too much. The question is whether this is a problem. If you argue […]