The New York Times points us to a possible first in the state government bond market. My initial reaction was to wonder about flood insurance risk assessment by state, and wether our conversation might go beyond FEMA into more real areas of risk assessment. Mostly we seem to spend our time not avoiding risk but […]

This item confirms that the Northwest Plan for Social Security would work rather well for Congress, Social Security, and beneficiaries. Beltway conventional wisdom thought otherwise. My own reaction was of puzzlement by the Beltway conventional wisdom. Fiscal Times reports: We’ve already seen evidence that consumers have largely shrugged off this year’s expiration of the payroll tax […]

Via The Big Picture and Ritholz comes Nervousness in over banked Europe Go no further than the following two charts to understand why markets freaked out over Dijsselbloem’s comments.    Europe is way overbanked and vulnerable to financial sector shocks.Even in the so-called “safe haven” Switzerland the banking system is outsized relative to the country’s GDP.  […]

David Zetland writes a well written nine page look at the limits of economics in at least the media and political level, and a look at the limits of what economic models have to offer most people. This will be a series of posts highlighting major points over time. The paper must be downloaded to […]

Lifted from Robert Waldmann’sStochastic Thoughts: 32. Note that the US constitution grants the same due process rights to citizens and non citizens. This time I pick on Steve Benen who wrote “The drones themselves are a fairly new tool, but the use of technology is tangential to the underlying point about the use of force, […]

by Mike Kimel Accountability Watching the slow motion train wreck that is the European economy right now, and the Argentine economy just about always, I started to wonder – should political leaders be personally liable for their failures? Obviously, there is no way that someone whose ineptitude puts a creates a crash that causes severe […]

Update: I have been unable to repair the blogspot feed so far 2:30 P.M……can anybody help? Update 2: MEV repaired the feed and the editorial backlinks problem. In case you are wondering what is going on, our migration did not work as planned.  Thank you for your patience.  We lost the rss feed, and due […]

The migration process to wordpress from blogger is to start about 11:30 PM March 21. Hopefully there will be few glitches. Our new design has some features to be added after the migration and can be explained then. Soon we will welcome readers to our new look, and allow readers to explore posts in a […]

by Linda Beale(op-ed) The Evils of Corporatism I have often written in these pages about “corporatism”, an approach that pervades our economy and many government agencies and does not align with the interests of the majority of Americans. Corporatism runs rampant today in states’ treatment of their public universities, treasures of the American educational system […]