CBS Marketwatch Devalues their Brand. Kash views the carnage: Despite all the rhetoric and posturing we see in the media and in Washington D.C., it is safe to say categorically that the U.S. Treasury will not default on its debt after August 2nd, even if the debt ceiling is not raised. Not only will the […]

Note:This was going to be short pieces about things I missed during a week of illness. It turned into a Very Long Piece riffing on two posts from Capital Gains and Games. And that’s without even mentioning the bravura work Stan Collender is doing there: see, for instance, this note that a deficit reduction bill […]

So I use Pandora on my Droid, and it’s pretty reasonable. I haven’t done anything complicated, or even created any mixes. And when I pick Bruce Cockburn Radio or Stevie Wonder Radio or Don Henley Radio or any of the other stations that are perfectly safe to play while at work, there will occasionally be […]

I was taking the day off, but this is the best news the Obama Administration could get right now.* Wonder how they’ll screw it up? I second the (self-)nomination of Dr. Black, on condition he commit to bringing me on as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets, which was held in its Glory […]

Fifteen years ago this evening, my wife made the biggest mistake of her life. And she still hasn’t repented. But that doesn’t mean there might not be a little “buyer’s remorse“: G-d help me, that was the best specific option I could find.* So let’s go instead with a standard: *Really, folks, does no one […]

This is why Andrew Leonard (h/t Yves Smith) gets paid for blogging and I don’t. He tries to do the impossible: make sense out of Michelle Bachmann’s “economics“: 1) The interest can easily be paid for … Bachmann is making the argument here that the U.S. can choose to pay its creditors — the various […]

Mark Thoma joins Dr. Black, putting him one-up on some Liberal Bloggers Who Should Know Better.* Thoma: 1. You have to make the Republicans pay in terms of eroded public support before they will agree to cooperate at all. The president in particular has not played a long-run strategy, the Republicans have, and the results […]

If I made this up, you would never believe me: “He informed me by text while he was on the floor,” [Erie County Republican Chairman Nicholas A.] Langworthy said of [New York, State Sen. Mark J.] Grisanti’s Friday vote. “I urged him to stick by his word he had given. The people elected him on […]

Yes, it’s another “AB was right” post. Detractors of this blog in general and me in particular could stop reading now. But they shouldn’t. Anyone who thought through the economics could have pointed out what I did on the 17th: From [Republican Congressman John] Boehner’s site: At least 30 percent of employers would gain economically […]

We have just printed the eleventh (11th) straight week in which new jobless claims have exceeded 400,000 people. As Krugman notes, “The Fed predicts disastrously high unemployment as far as the eye can see(pdf) [a]nd, in response to this dire prospect, it declares its work done.” So this it is almost palliative that Barry Ritholtz […]