Spent the morning at this event: presentations and discussion by Joe Stiglitz, Yves Smith, Mike Konczal, Joe Gagnon, Matt Yglesias, Tom Palley, and many others. Mike K. tole me he expects that video will be available this evening, at least of the speakers’s presentations. I plan to post at more length later; meanwhile, you can […]

A lot of trading in the Fixed Income (and especially FX) market is done for “liquidity” purposes. There is often an underlying goal involved (e.g., push prices higher with small lots, sell large ones at the elevated prices) and frequently such strategies are discussed as “algorithmic trading.” (Example: the algorithm estimates that you will need […]

Done your taxes yet?

“The practice of medicine was accepted to be a chancy way to make a living, and nobody expected a doctor to get rich, least of all the doctors themselves.”  – Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science, p. 4 (Penguin, 1995 edition, quote via Google Books) Lost in the discussion of Paul Ryan’s “plan” is the group […]

More on the health-care later, but let me be clear: Congressman Paul Ryan’s “plan” is NOT a budget. Budgets show Sources and Uses. As the CBO analysis makes clear, this “budget” is no more a budget than Ryan’s last round of fakery. To wit: The path for revenues as a percentage of GDP was specified […]

Economists’s claims that taxes should not be paid by corporations is based on the premise that government should be relatively  inefficient and/or run a deficit in perpetuity. Discuss.

I want to open a pizza place. I find an available space; a previous pizza place that went out of business. The only catch is that there are four other pizza places nearby, none of which is overcrowded, except at the peak of peak hours. One–a block or two away, on another street–is the oldest […]

It’s no secret I’m not a fan of the birth-death adjustment to the employment serieses: not from a necessary belief that they’re biased, but rather because they give the lie to the illusion of accurate monthly data. But imagine for the moment that there had been no adjustment before the January data release.  The headline […]

I don’t remember seeing any of this type of story last year. But this year, Socialism stories abound from the Midwest. My ex-roommate* sends this link to a story about Butler Bulldogs’s Senior Matt Howard’s family being able to attend the NCAA Finals tonight in Houston (video link here). Luke Winn of Sports Illustrated covered […]