by rdan Angry Bear and I have reached an understanding regarding the blog and decision making. He has been referred to as owning the blog, as much as it can be with such a rowdy group, and has agreed to transfer this ownership to me, sort of the Bill Gates giving over to Steve Ballmer […]

Lifted from comments from Spencer’s post on Productivity and the stock market Dan Becker: Mike Panzer at Financial Armageddon has been on the issue that the “street” is missing all that is going on around them. From his blog: http://panzner.typepad.com/ However, I wonder if a new paper, From Keeping Up with the Joneses to Keeping […]

Simon Johnson comments on Standard and Poor’s irrational ratings: Standard & Poor’s downgrade of United States government debt last month has been much debated, but not enough attention has been devoted to the fact, reported last week by Bloomberg News, that it continues to rate securities based on subprime mortgages as AAA. In short, S.&P. […]

A note from Firedoglake is relevent for the Super Committee today as a bid to keep the meetings less secret. Call or write committee chairs for more open meetings.: Senator Patty Murray: (202) 224-2621 Representative Jeb Hensarling: (202) 225-3484 Sample Script: Hello, my name is ________ and I am calling to ask that [SENATOR MURRAY […]

by Mike Kimel The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 5: 1968 – 1988This post is the fourth in a series that looks at the relationship between real economic growth and the top individual marginal tax rate. The first looked at the period from 1901 to 1928, the second from 1929 […]

Reuters provides a synopsis of a report by the OECD on tax-avoidance strategies by multinational corporations: 30/08/2011 – Due to the recent financial and economic crisis, global corporate losses have increased significantly. Numbers at stake are vast, with loss carry-forwards as high as 25% of GDP in some countries. Though most of these claims are […]

Bill McBride offers a look at the employment/population ratios by age at Calculated Risk, also offered at Mark Thoma’s Economist View: There will probably be some “bounce back” for both men and women (some of the recent decline is probably cyclical), but the long term trend for men is down. And several updates in graph […]

Spencer came home from vacation and found downed trees and lines and sporadic wifi connections he attempted in the neighborhood. His report will have its own timetable this week. I found Michael Konczal’s take at New Deal 2.0 useful. There was certainly a lot of reactions to the information. Payroll data came in this morning […]

by Rebecca Wilder Recently we saw retail sales figures come out of Spain, Germany, France, and Italy. Across Europe, the seasonally-adjusted pattern of real retail sales is diverging. The chart above illustrates the real seasonally-adjusted and working-day-adjusted (for Europe) level of retail sales across key countries in Europe and the US (for comparison). The raw […]