Some catching up on health care reform progress makes sense as we keep in mind these posts from Beat the Press Dean Baker writes: Second, the story of massive huge future budget deficits has little to do with aging. It is a story of a broken private health care system. If the United States paid […]
By Noni Mausa Wiggle Room In a claustrophobic economy where the lions share of the fruit of citizens’ efforts is funneled to a small number of beneficiaries, where institutions intended to intervene on their behalf have been rejigged to work backwards, what can the little guy do to gain some wiggle room? The poorest Americans […]
First I would like to stress again that I have great respect of Janet Yellen. I try to only critize people whom I respect (my posts show just how respectful I am in general). So this comment on her use of event studies is really a comment on event studies and not on Yellen in […]
Peter Dorman at Econospeak, who is smarter and nicer than I am,* boils down the question: [D]o you believe that managers normally make the right decisions over how to run organizations? If you believe that premise, please explain: Why all those great managers of the late 1940s through the mid-1970s ran defined benefit contribution plans, […]
by Mike Kimel Another Look at Keynesianism and the Great Stagnation Cross-posted at the Presimetrics blog Last week I had a post noting that the US government followed more or less naive Keynesian policies (whether on purpose or not I cannot say) from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. The post also notes that […]
Madison Wisconsin anti Scott Walker sign of the day via www.first-draft.com
When is an event ? Yesterday Janet Yellen said Event studies can therefore be helpful in gauging the financial market effects of such communications. [skip] Last August, the FOMC announced that it would begin reinvesting principal payments on agency MBS and agency debt into longer-term Treasury securities, and over the subsequent couple of months or […]
Do my eyes deceive me ? Is this the Washington Post ? Is Ezra Klein writing under the double pseudonym “Neil Irwin and Michael A. Fletcher” ? Irwin and Fletcher warn of two threats to the US economy — high oil prices and tea partiers (call it the Texas tea party menace). U.S. economic recovery […]
Today the German Federal Statistics Office reported that the February Consumer Price Index is expected to mark a 2.0% (2.047% by my calculations, which is very close to a rounded 2.1%) annual pace in February 2011. This is simply a ‘flash’ print, and the Statistics Office was very careful to discount the fact that inflation […]