by Tom Bozzo, cross-posted from Marginal Utility Competition in (increasing) service quality doesn’t reduce costs: Dane County’s two hospitals that deliver babies are each spending close to $40 million to spruce up maternity units and related facilities for a simple reason: Young women are key health care consumers, often deciding where their families will seek […]

Update: Brad DeLong appears to confirm that Obama’s inner circle would be best served by being placed in a circular firing squad, given live ammo, and being told to “do what is right.” The plethora of disingenuous claims that Barack Obama “won” with the McConnell-Obama “compromise” are legend. See, for instance, the idiocy of Andrew […]

Update: Brad DeLong looks at the data and suggests that the problem may be that the current President is as innumerate as the previous one. Mark Thoma quotes James Kwak: So no, I don’t think Obama is abandoning his principles for political advantage; I think these are his principles. And while I’m upset at him, […]

In honor of his finally being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: And his co-inductee, who now does wait for no one:

The NYT pretends that the Cuomo/Rattner battle is about personalities, but briefly let’s the mask slip: Neither side seems willing to budge, each insisting he is the wronged party: the attorney general feels deceived and affronted, and the Wall Street money manager feels persecuted for conduct he views as standard business practice. “‘Feels’ deceived and […]

Not certain this link will work, but at Interfluidity, SRW replies to Karl Smith, closing with a sentiment with which I am very much in sympathy: It is not technocratic economists who will win the day and pull us out of our cul-de-sac, but angry Irishmen and Spaniards who challenge, on moral terms, the right […]

Echoes of Japan, echoes of the Great Depression. One of the few economists who knows history closes a post by presenting the proper context for the choices: A quick exit [by Ireland, from the Euro] may still be better than a decade of slow, grinding deflation combined with Zombie banks and Zombie household balance sheets […]

Assume I believe in risk-adjusted return on capital. That is, I don’t buy a bond yielding 12% instead of one yielding 6% without first considering that the yield difference is affected by the likelihood of Principal return being lower. (But I will buy the 12% bond if I believe the risk premium is too high […]

What Treasury under Geither does, according to the Washington Post: “I think we are known as the front line,” said [Michael] Pedroni, 38, a former International Monetary Fund economist and Federal Reserve Bank of New York employee who has spent time at a Wall Street research firm. “Our analysis is meant to be very candid, […]

First, there was Fred Schwed’s Where are the Customer’s Yachts?, which is still the standard bearer for why Money Managers are overpaid. Now (via the NYT) there is The Investment Answer (preface here [PDF]). The Prologue opens more Matt Taibbi than Jason Zweig: Wall Street brokers and active money managers use your relative lack of […]