So the Fed has kept interest rates at their rock bottom. Will they ever be able to raise them? Let me take a closer look… Tim Taylor writes about the impact of low long-term interest rates. He ends his post with this quote… “The BIS report raises the uncomfortable question of whether we are riding […]

Brad DeLong catches Tim Berners Lee Timothy B. Lee [h/t Bob in comments] being, to be nice, disingenuous: …The idea was that [HP and Compaq] would be able to do the things they already did more effectively if they joined forces. Management consultants who examined the merger for HP found that (as Fiorina loved to […]

Should the Fed raise the base interest rate? They really shouldn’t at this point. Will they? They probably will because they still see years of growth. I do not see years of growth ahead… Let me explain. Almost one year ago I wrote that capacity utilization would start falling. (link) It has fallen since that […]

by Joseph Joyce Capital Flows, Credit Booms and Bank Crises Studies of the impact of capital inflows have established that debt inflows can lead to bank crises (see here and here). Unlike equity, payments on debt are contractual and can not be cancelled if there is an economic downturn, which intensifies any shocks to the […]

To add to this attention getter, 70% of all the students who defaulted in 2013 went to non-traditional schools or “for-profit” schools. Of students who graduated from traditional schools and were required to start paying back student loans in 2011, two percent of graduate students and eight percent of undergraduate students defaulted as compared to […]

This is my usual post lamenting the fact that reasonable people allow supply side dynamic scorers to set the terms of debate. They confidently assert that tax cuts for the rich cause more rapid GDP growth and want to argue whether that means they pay for themselves . Jeb!’s economists admit that they don’t without […]

At 12:07 Eastern standard time 9/10/2015 Alan Rappaport wrote an article on Jeb Bush’s tax proposal whose headline seemed to me to be the title of a Bush campaign press release — it stressed the proposal to close the carried interest loophole and not the huge cuts to top tax rates. About 4 hours later […]