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

Kauffman Economics Bloggers Forum Update and a Few Links of Noe

I’m in Kansas City, where the Royals have started the season as one would expect of the current iteration of the team. Fortunately, I’m not here for the baseball, but rather for the Kauffman Economics Bloggers Forum. There will be presentations tomorrow (agenda here; homepage for live streaming here) in three session. The morning features […]

More on Real Interest Rates

In comments Mark Sadowski noted that short term real interest rates have fallen a lot since Ben Bernanke began announcing QE2. In earlier posts, I had considered only the 7 year constant maturity and the 5 year constant maturity series. I think that medium term real interest rates matter most for investment and that real […]

We Beat the Germans in 1918/And They’ve Hardly Bothered Us Since Then

Brad DeLong culls the comments to this post at Crooked Timber to produce a “with notably rare exceptions” Greatest Hits package—his second post riffing on the original—in honor of The Maestro continuing to attempt to improve the reputations of Paul Volcker and Ben Bernanke, if not G. William (“I ran a company, I didn’t need […]

Who Speaks for a CDO ?

It has been asserted that many mortgage servicing contracts are inefficient, because they give the servicer incentives to foreclose even when re-negotiation would be better for the owner of the mortgage. An inefficiency is a profit opportunity. If there are such contracts, then a different contract can generate higher revenue for both the servicer and […]

What more can the Fed do ?

This post is long, vague, sloppy and after the jump. The one sentence version is that the Fed can affect the real economy by buying assets which private investors consider risky. Before discussing useful things which I think the Fed can do to stimulate the economy, I will explain at length why I think that […]

World Water and ho hum

David Zetland at Aguanomics suggests that the problems worldwide with water for drinking and as importantly sanitation receives little attention. I like the poll on his site which suggests for the US that floods or droughts are the main driving force getting us to notice, or special interests. World Water WTF Today (March 22) is […]

Guest Post: "RJS Analysis – Japanese Disaster Impact"

RJS had been a long-time commenter at my blog, News N Economics, and has joined Angry Bear’s thread of comments. RJS runs his own blog, Global Glass Onion, where he publishes a weekly newsletter encompassing news from around the world for his readership. Collaborating with Dan, we asked RJS to make a similar contribution to […]