The Nobel Economists Petitiion on Carbon Tax And Dividend Plan As many now know, a large group of prominent economists, led by a large group of Nobel Prize winners, has published a petition in the Wall Street Journal. This petition declares the idea of putting a tax on carbon and then returning the receipts from […]
Weirdly Non-Monotonic Yield Curves This is a situation that may be on the verge of disappearing and more or less normalizing, but over the last couple of months US bond markets have exhibited a weird phenomenon of non-monotonicity. It has been even weirder than what we saw during the period of negative nominal interest rates, […]
Whatever Happened To Iran? Who? What? Where? Long a headliner in the news, Iran has disappeared from the headlines, and even the inside pages. It has largely disappeared from the news, after being the big headline for a long time. This is probably good for Iran, despite its many problems. I have made a big […]
Getting Ever More Surreal I am referring to a comment Sean Hannity made on his show earlier this evening in his monologue. The reports tht President Trump was under investigation by FBI Counterintelligence as being a possible “Russian asset” supposedly taking orders from Vladimir Putin has pushed uber Trump defender Hannity to ever more surreal […]
Slavery in the US An issue so far not openly addressed in this “Partial Shutdown” situation is that those who have been deemed to be “essential,” are now working without pay, even though we all believe that they will eventually receive their overdue backpay. I really do not know the law that says that these […]
How Shocking Was Shock Therapy? In 2007 Naomi Klein got quite a bit of attention and mostly favorable comment for her book, Shock Doctrine. It promulgated that global elites used periods of crisis around the world to force damaging neoliberal policies derived from the Chicago School and Washington Consensus upon unhappy populations that suffered greatly […]
Can We Minimize Econogenic Outcomes? I am back from the annual ASSA/AEA meetings in Atlanta. I learned a new term that on checking I find has been around for about five years. It is “econogenic,” coined by George DeMartino, who spoke on this in a session on “Ethics and Economics” held by the Association for […]
On Some Predictions I am not somebody who makes endo/beginning of year predictions, and I am not about to stsrt now. But I have just read a guest post by Jeffrey Frankel on Econbrowser where he brags about making six accurate predictions for 2018 while not reporting on some others he made that did not […]
(Dan here…Paul Ryan’s farewell speech, Jeff Session’s targeting ‘consent decrees’, and what else?) Goodbye To Goodlatte And The GOP Going From Lincoln To Trump Outgoing Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte is my Congressman. I even know him, having had civil almost friendly relations. He has been in office for 26 years. But […]
The Last Adult In The Room Walks Out Over ISIS Yesterday President Trump announced that he was removing all US troops from Syria over the next 30 days. Today, “Mad Dog” Jim Mattis, the US Secretary of Defense and widely viewed as “the last adult in the room” among the Trump national security team, announced […]