Buce sends us to Der Spiegel’s description of Barack Obama’s potential 2012 opponents (“You Think This is Bad?”) John Kay in today’s FT (no link) tells us why letting economists pontificate about finance is a Mug’s Game. The mugging being of people who are stupid enough to believe economists. (If Brad DeLong or Mark Thoma […]

Brad DeLong (pulled from an otherwise-spot-on post): Two years ago, after all, the recession was over. The Recovery: I started these from the first month after NBER’s recession end date. Note that there is one true, consistent growth line—sadly, that’s the mean (average) duration of Unemployment. If this is victory, Pyrrhus of Epirus had nothing […]

Not a very long time, even if there were full and complete co-operation. Or, as LBJ said, Source (cross-posted from Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo)

byMike Kimel Barry Ritholtz points us to a Bloomberg article showing, once again, that when it came to measures to prop up the economy in 2008, some animals are more equal than others: Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So […]

byMike Kimel [edited to make authorship clearer] Libertarians come in many flavors, but I think most of them would agree that in an ideal world, the government would be very small and have limited powers – essentially, the government would control national defense and perhaps adjudicate over property rights disputes (i.e., maintain police and/or the […]

by Mike Kimel In this post, I will show that during the New Deal era, changes in the real economic growth rate can be explained almost entirely by the earlier changes in federal government’s non-defense spending. There are going to be a lot of words at first – but if you’re the impatient type, feel […]

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, without whose FRED database and Excel Add-in Economics Bloggers (and Matt Yglesias) would be Even More Boring, has been running a series of Discussions explaining why the Fed is incompetent—er, Why They Don’t Follow Their Dual Mandate—er, well, something about how They’re Doing The Best They Can.* The […]

On this Armistice Veteran’s Day, let’s try to do a counterfactual and Make Brad DeLong Happy.* Let’s assume that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley—commonly referred to, incorrectly, as “the repeal of Glass_Steagall”—is A Good Thing. Well, I won’t go that far. An Inevitable Thing. [Many sentences about Larry Summers omitted here.] After all, anyone who was paying attention […]

A commenter at Steve Benen’s Washington Monthly blog was grousing (correctly, as spencer notes in comments) that Benen had allocated all of the 2009 change (read:drop) in private-sector jobs to Obama, while GWB was in office for the first 19.5 daysduring the time the employment data for January was gathered. Turns out that there were […]

I wanted to look at the WSJ job database, suspecting what I might find, but currently lack the bandwidth in a major way. Fortunately, Noah took some (more) time from his thesis (“distraction from productive activity”) and did the dirty work. Apparently, being a STEM undergraduate isn’t the path to Nirvana:* I went through the […]