Hat tip to Mark Thoma for pointing us to The Regulation Crisis by James Surowiecki. The obvious problems of graft and the revolving door between government and industry, in other words, were really symptoms of a more fundamental pathology: regulation itself became delegitimatized… This view was exacerbated by the way regulation works… Too many regulators, […]

by Linda Bealecrossposted with Ataxingmatter Gulf Oil Spill: time to revise resource tax policy; how about a BEST surcharge? The oil spill in the Gulf continues, wreaking hazard along the Gulf coast and threatening the Atlantic coastline as well. Birds, fish, sea flora and fauna are all threatened. Tourism and fishing face enormous economic costs. […]

Steve Jobs is promising a lot of stuff that AT&T is not capable of delivering. Someone needs to explain to me why Steve Jobs is a Brilliant Leader.

by Beverly Mann A Gap Not In Time But In Judicial Veracitycrossposted with The Annarborist “Talk of judicial activism tends to focus on results, but the Guggenheim case shows that maybe we should talk a little bit more about method.”—Doug Kendall and Elizabeth Wydra, “Torturing the Law: Jay Bybee models conservative judicial activism in the […]

by Mike Kimel Unemployment During the New Deal Cross posted with the Presimetrics Blog. This is not the post the post I was planning to write this weekend, but frankly every time I post something that touches on FDR, people get ahold of me with the same canard: unemployment in the U.S. was somewhere around […]

Robert Waldmann I completely missed this. From the final House Bill, click through (I can’t direct link) or find in the pdf “SEC. 6009. REMOVAL OF STATUTORY REFERENCES TO CREDIT RATINGS.” This removes the references to NRSRO from federal agencies and the law. The LeMieux amendment is the language of SEC. 6009 from the House […]

Robert Waldmann is commenting on a comment at Mark Thoma’s blog. The comment NotMarkT ha detto… One of the difficulties with model selection for assessing tail probabilities is that the empirical data often can’t distinguish among light (e.g., normal) or heavy tailed (e.g., pareto) distributions. The model selection problem then becomes a question of optimism […]

The Financial Times points us to the G-20 communique abandoning stimulus because “they recognize financial market concerns”: Finance ministers from the world’s leading economies ripped up their support for fiscal stimulus on Saturday, recognising that financial market concerns over sovereign debt had forced a much greater focus on deficit reduction. The meeting of the Group […]

Lifted from Econospeak, PGL speaks out: Do All 222 of These Economists Think the Multiplier for Changes in Government Spending is Negative? John Boehner uses Twitter to claim that economists think reductions in government spending will lead to an economic recovery. He has cited this letter signed by 222 economists as the basis for his […]

Coast Guard Told Public Not to ‘Fixate’ On Rate of Spill While Sitting On Video videos show more clearly than ever how BP, with little resistance from the Coast Guard or other federal agencies, kept the public in the dark about just how bad things were beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. With […]