Happy New Year from the Bears! Readers make this the best blog site in the world!

rdan Some are making predictions for 2009. How about you….send or leave some for 2009. Update: I will archive these projections. Obviously the timing of some projections is pretty hard to nail down….but then look at Ken’s 2007 post below.

rdan Running Machine Polar Bear Animation

rdan Movie Guy asks in comments: I would prefer to read the risk assessment viewpoints of bankers and underwriters as they understand that subject matter far better than most. That’s the best starting point in my opinion. Whether their models were wrong or were simply ignored internally or by regulators is a question that hasn’t […]

by cactus GW is on vacation. He’s certainly had a lot of these vacations. And yeah, I understand, he still gets his briefings and the like. (I note, most white collar workers I know take work home during their vacations and weekends too.) I realize he doesn’t have a boss and he’s not accountable to […]

rdan The LA Times reports on news regarding shale oil development: Salt Lake City – A titanic battle between the West’s two traditional power brokers – Big Oil and Big Water – has begun. At stake is one of the largest oil reserves in the world, a vast cache trapped beneath the Rocky Mountains containing […]

cross posted with Health Care Think Tank by STR “Should we return to the Certificate of Need (CON)? In the 70s and 80s many states had health care Certificate of Need laws. In general, the CON required state approval for the construction or major renovations of hospitals, the construction or major renovation of nursing home […]

rdan Jamie Galbraith in the Predator State: Galbraith follows with an impertinent question: if conservatives no longer take free markets seriously, why should liberals? Why keep liberal thought in the straitjacket of pay-as-you-go, of assigning inflation control to the Federal Reserve, of attempting to “make markets work”? Why not build a new economic policy based […]

rdan Blast from the past but the question remains: How do the wealthy actually plan: rational as in markets, or wealth expectations, see research begun but not continued here: 1990 Noise Traders. Robert will be surprised today. Update: Link corrected from pdf to html, which is not as easily read. Named authors are Brad DeLong, […]

rdan PGL at Econospeak points to this article in the NYT by Casey Mulligan. Mark Thoma at Economist’s View picks up on the item as well, that the reasons for higher unemployment figures lay squarely on the shoulders of US workers. Good discussion happens at these sites. It sure is a poke in the eye […]