by Mike Kimel The Fed, Primary Dealers, and the Ineffectiveness of Monetary Policy The Federal Reserve’s primary tool for monetary policy is buying or selling securities, in particularly US notes, bills and bonds. But… it doesn’t buy and sell bonds to you and me. Instead, it deals with primary dealers – the complete list is […]
Real News interviews Jeannette Wicks-Lim is an Associate Professor at the Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. Wicks-Lim specializes in labor economics with an emphasis on the low-wage labor market… WICKS-LIM: Well, one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is that because of the recent proposal by President Obama to raise the […]
Many economists — mostly the freshwater/neoclassical/supply-side/conservative types, but also many on the left — hold in their heads a very peculiar model of how economies work. It’s a model of a barter/real-goods economy in which money only plays the role of convenience. In this model, if you don’t eat some portion of the corn you […]
PGL at Econospeak notes: Darla Cameron and Jia Lynn Yang want to report on how US multinationals are shifting profits to foreign tax havens but their key statistic is the ratio of US tax expenses to worldwide profits: A Washington Post analysis of data compiled by Capital IQ found that in the late 1960s and […]
Lifted from Robert Waldmann’s Stochastic Thoughts for a Sunday afternoon: Christian Roots of School Voucher Movement Still Pretty Obvious …. those of us who are over the age of 40 and have three-digit IQs remember where this all started: with segregated Christian schools in the South who were denied tax-exempt status in the 70s. This […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Obamacare Fail When I mention problems with Obamacare implementation in the blogosphere, I am pummeled. Liberals think I am overly cynical, too focused on the practical, and I fail to understand the power of good intentions. Ok. The S.H.O.P. program for small businesses has been delayed until […]
by David Zetland, a series of posts highlighting major points over time. The paper must be downloaded to read. Wageningen UR – Environmental Economics and Natural Resources Group; PERC – Property and Environment Research CenterEconomists Owe Ecology an ApologyMarch 9, 2013 Part 2 Nature Bats Last Pare 3 These numbers don’t add up These numbers […]
Following up on my earlier post, about people swimming in a stream of economic change over which they have no control: As I often do, I was re-reading some old Steve Randy Waldman posts, and came across one that made the same point quite elegantly: “Stabilizing prices is immoral“. (If you want to understand how […]
David Zetland at Aguanomics asks a very basic question about our perceptions of what constitutes management: Question of the week I’m thinking that “water manager” is not the right title for people who work at drinking water utilities, irrigation districts, and other water organizations. That’s because they are not really supposed to manage water supply […]
That final paragraph really gets to one of my obsessions: that the political left and the mainstream media focus so heavily on culture-wars issues–especially regarding the Supreme Court–that the corporatocracy and other rightwing non-culture-wars interests (states’ rights!) have been having an incredible run these past years in the courts, without most people even knowing it. […]