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

The Challenges of Achieving Financial Stability

by Joseph Joyce The Challenges of Achieving Financial Stability The end of the dot.com bubble in 2000 led to a debate over whether central banks should take financial stability into account when formulating policy, in addition to the usual indicators of economic stability such as inflation and unemployment. The response from many central bankers was […]

Is that a good economic development deal? A checklist

In my last post, I discussed one of the most important sets of questions regarding any proposed economic development subsidy: How much does it cost? Is that too much? The answer, assuming that we are not going to overhaul our broken subsidy system overnight, was that we see if we’re paying too much by looking […]

Quelle Surprise, Labor Productivity is Up while Labor Wages are Still Down!

BLS economist Shawn Sprague writes What Can Labor Productivity Tell Us About the U.S. Economy? Labor worked the exact same number of hours in 1998 as they did in 2013 or ~194 billion hours. While there was no growth in the number of hours worked, the Non-Institutional Civilian Population grew by 40 million people, and […]

Points of agreement with John Taylor

In a WSJ interview, John Taylor, who is a professor at Stanford University, sees that the nominal interest rate from the Federal Reserve should be 1.25% now, according to his own Taylor rule. He says the financial markets are working fine. “The financial crisis is ages ago now. The financial markets seem to be working […]

AWESOME opinion today by Roberts in Bond v. United States!

I’ve written extensively here at AB about a two-time Supreme Court case called Bond v. United States, first three years ago when the case was heard the first time, then in the last few months as the case was heard there again.  My most recent post on it, from May 15, was called “The Supreme […]

How Heat Flows and Why It Matters

Via Azimuth comes a very detailed and sourced post on basic physics of  climate change.  Well worth the time to view or review, especially before commenting. by Jan Galkowski 1. How Heat Flows and Why It Matters Is there something missing in the recent climate temperature record? Heat is most often experienced as energy density, […]

Social Security: 2 Programs, 3 Projections, 3 Actuarial Periods

(Update: the numbers in the above Table represent the present payroll gap. That is an immediate increase in FICA equalling any negative number would fund its respective program over that given period under that set of assumptions). (Update 2…a quirk in the comment section preventing viewing the chart on landing page is fixed…Dan) The standard […]