Prof Barkley Rosser at Econospeak also asks questions on the freaking out over the fiscal deficit numbers: Only 6% Of Public Knows Deficit Is Declining Yes, here we go again, massive public ignorance post # I forget how many. This has been floating around out there for awhile but was on Rachel Maddow last night, […]
by Linda Beale Senate Confirms Lew at Treasury The US Senate confirmed Jacob Lew as Treasury secretary by a 71 to 26 vote (with 20 Republicans voting with Democrats) late Wednesday. See Jeremy Peters,Senate, in a more affable mode, backs Treasury nominee, New York Times (Sept. 27, 2013). I’ve covered my reservations about Jack Lew […]
Via Bloomberg comes this snippet from testimony between Senator Warren and Ben Bernanke. Follow the link as the embed does not seem to work. Partial Transcript via Global Economic Trends Warren: These big financial institutions are getting cheaper borrowing to the tune of $83 billion in a single year, simply because people believe government would […]
I watched Dr. Wolff (Professor emeritus, UMass) on this past week episode with Bill Moyers. At the end of this show, Mr. Moyers invited the viewers to submit questions to Dr. Wolf who has agreed to return in a couple of weeks to answer them. Here is he with an interview by Julianna Forlano of […]
If Asymptosis has any tiny claim to any important influence, it might be that anonymous and magisterial commenter JKH used the comments section here to first bruit his insight (both tautological and profound) that S = I + (S – I). He revisited that construct and concept again recently, and I’ll leave it to you […]
Justice Scalia provided the most jarring comment throughout the lengthened argument. Belittling the government argument that the reenacted law was passed by a unanimous vote in the Senate, Scalia set off in a lengthy counter-argument, saying that made no difference because members of Congress would not take the political risk of undoing what he called […]
At least on certain issues. I’m not inherently a great pessimist, but with few exceptions each passing month for over a decade now has seen my optimism whither, at least a little. So I can’t help but see the manure-colored lining in this otherwise rosy, fluffy cloud. Steve Benen reports that according to the new […]
While we are busy paying attention to the 550th edition of Republican-caused fake crises (aka the sequester), a much more real crisis is brewing in the Eurozone. Richard Field at Trust Your Instincts flags a Reuters report that that Eurozone regulators are strongly considering a proposal to make not just investors in Cyprus banks pay […]
This is the political atmosphere within which the battle will unfold over who is to blame for the damage done by the sequester. Now, in fairness, Republicans are favored on the deficit and controlling government spending. But even here, when you drill down deeper, you find that fifty two percent say the automatic across the […]
To me, one of the big mysteries of the sequester blame game is why some in the punditry keep echoing John Boehner’s proud Obama-proposed-the-sequester line, without pointing out what the only alternative was. The most baldly ridiculous of articles in that narrow genre is Washington Post columnist–and, I suspect, not coincidentally, Bob Woodward colleague–David Ignatius’s […]