João Marcus Marinho Nunes is personally offended by my previous Angry Bear post.   Personally I was ‘offended’ by being ‘accused’ of “using short-time series data”, ignoring “what is a valid context” and “cherry picking”. Which was odd, since I didn’t accuse him of anything.  In fact, he wasn’t even on my radar screen.  He […]

Andrew Bacevich writes: Twelve and a half years after Congress didn’t declare war on an organization of hundreds or, at most, thousands of jihadis scattered mainly across the backlands of the planet, and instead let President George W. Bush and his cohort loose to do whatever they wanted; twelve and a half years after the […]

Via Naked Capitalism comes this question about comparing economic data for a successful area in the aggregate with contrasting signs of things being not so good for some. Puzzling Economic Sightings Now and again I ask readers for input on what they are seeing locally, a sort of regional check on the statistics and media […]

by Linda beale The ‘ignorance is bliss’/’ride’em cowboy’ mentality of today’s GOP Today’s GOP is dominated by the Tea Party types that are a cross between an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand– the “ignorance is bliss” philosophy– and a 1860s cowboy as depicted in the 1960s western-mania TV shows– the “hell bent […]

Update: Link at Scotus blog http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/06/wednesday-round-up-187/. As prosecutors, police agencies and civil libertarians consider the ruling’s implications, Justice Scalia’s stark dissent — and the fact that President Obama’s two appointees to the court so far agreed with it — makes it worthy of scrutiny, even if he was on the losing side. His argument is […]

Via the Washington Post comes this idea of economic incentive: But research by noted economists Karl Case, John Quigley and Robert Shiller found the households were more powerful affected by declines in wealth than increases. An unexpected 1 percent drop in housing prices caused a permanent 0.1 percent decrease in spending, that study found. But […]

by Linda Beale Tax breaks for wealthy; corporate tax shouldn’t be reformed away; seed patents are a real scandal No time for lengthy commentary today, but worth calling attention to some noteworthy items. (1) The CBO released a new report detailing the income groups that benefit most from the various tax expenditures in the internal […]

From Barry Ritholz and The Big Picture via  Investingchannel is this piece on a Proposal for New Hedge Fund Fee Structure: One of my pet peeves is the way that insiders  — whether corporate CEOs, hedge fund managers, or elected politicos — capture compensation (or credit) for normal cyclical gains they had little or nothing […]

Jon Perr at Crooks and Liars does a nice review on defining who benefits the most from tax breaks:  CBO Study Shows Tax Breaks Favor the Rich   “Every year, tax expenditures–Uncle Sam’s myriad credits, exclusion, loopholes and breaks–cost the U.S. Treasury over $1 trillion a year. To put that in perspective, that figure is greater than […]