I’m a chocoholic.  Can’t eat it as much as I used to.  So, this bit of news by way of C & L caught my eye.  I’ll let the article speak for it’s self. As a result of a settlement with the Hershey’s Company, Let’s Buy British Imports, or L.B.B., agreed this week to stop […]

Videos below the fold. I caught Edward Kleinbard the other morning on Cspan.  He is a professor of law and business at USC and a fellow at the Century Foundation.  His book: We are better than this: How Government Should Spend our Money.  If you google his name, articles will come up from October 2014.   […]

According to exit polls the leftist party Syriza clearly won the Greek elections Two exit polls show Syriza with a 12.5 percentage point lead over nearest party, New Demoracy. update a bit more: One poll suggested Syriza took 35.5% of the votes, and the other suggested it took 39.5%, well ahead of the ruling New […]

A fairly large number of economists have argued that Keynesians predicted that the fiscal cliff January 2013 and sequestration March 2013 would cause a recession. A fairly large number of Keynesian economists have denied personally making that prediction (including the oversigned). Only following a complaint in comments will I look up all the links at […]

A month late, I learn from brilliant economist Simon Wren-Lewis about the 3.5 year late revelation of the utter contempt that then European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet had for Democracy. I hand the microphone over to brilliant economist Paul DeGrauwe The ECB’s letter to the Spanish government is not the only one the ECB […]

The markets have been showing a rather particular schizophrenia over the last dozen or so years — but not, perhaps, the one you may be thinking of. This schizo-disconnect is between the goods markets and the asset markets, and their valuations of U.S. production. In short, the existing-asset markets think we’re producing and saving far […]

Mario Draghi announced European Central Bank Quantitative Easing yesterday. The plan is to buy long term public bonds for 60 billion euros a month from March at least through September 2016. Draghi said the program could be extended if inflation of slightly below 2% isn’t achieved. 60 billion a month is slightly above analysts’ average […]

Nick Rowe wonders why no one talks about price controls any more. I think this is related to his discussion of the gigantic influence of Milton Friedman on new Keynesian macroeconomics. See also this. Due to the same exchange, I recall tax based incomes policy. IIRC Paul Samuelson and especially Robert Solow were quite enthusiastic […]

Noah Smith put up a post Sunday purporting to show that things aren’t so bad for the middle class. Then he immediately shows us a chart of median household income. Stop right there. As I have argued before, this is always going to give you a rosier picture than reality. We need to look at […]