How else to explain a 20% drop in prices since The Destruction of the Gulf of Mexico? Oil fell below $70 Monday, reaching a low of $69.27 before rebounding slightly…The turnaround has been sudden — oil hit an 18-month high of $87.15 a barrel during trading on May 3. The plunge in oil extended to […]
No wonder Brad DeLong has had no luck persuading Christopher Edley to get rid of the malfeasant John Yoo. As Bob Somersby observes: Christopher Edley thinks he’s one of your “betters.” It’s hard to believe, but that’s the exceptionally low-IQ framework this self-proclaimed member of the elite enunciated in Sunday’s piece. According to Edley, rubes […]
The opening chapter of Jack Cashill’s Popes and Bankers relates his version of the tale of Melonie Griffith-Evans, a woman who in 2004 borrowed her way to losing her house. Ms. Griffith-Evans accepted loans in order to buy a house priced at $470,000 that resulted in her having to pay “roughly $3,500 a month.” Of […]
Sometimes, I hate being right. Most of those times are when I take a pessimistic view of data; this has happened a lot recently. It gets worse when the people who agree with you are none other than The Giant Vampire Squid. As the Wall Street Journal notes: Zero — First quarter GDP growth, minus […]
One of the things that goes without saying these days is that a recovery doesn’t lift all boats. It doesn’t lift all banks, either. For your consideration, the number and documented costs (in $MM) of bank closings in the U.S. since 2000.
As I should have noted yesterday, and as Arnold Kling discusses today, sometimes the questions are as revealing as the responses. And sometimes, the answers are suspiciously inconsistent. Below is the graphic from my question for the Q2 Kauffman Economic Outlook: A Quarterly Survey of Leading Economics Bloggers. Link to the survey press release here, […]
Consider this just another Rorschach test and discuss in comments as you will.
The great thing about Accounting Identities is that they must be true. The bad thing about Accounting Identities is that their truth is often trivial. Tim Duy notes the reality: We can’t all be net exporters The Greek crisis…is a reminder that global imbalances are still with us – and, if not corrected, will eventually […]
UPDATE: Tristero piles on the details that I assumed. And Bloix in comments there makes it clear that the diagram which has the Generals’s panties in twists is relatively straightforward compared to a car’s electrical system (as anyone who has used Erwin or Visio or even Powerpoint to build data flow diagrams can tell you). […]
by cactus Last week I wrote a post about some nonsense Glen Beck was peddling, with said nonsense originating with Thomas Woods. Woods claimed a smorgasbord of things, the dollar meal version being: 1. lefties talk up how the New Deal (big gubmint, tax hikes) saved the economy from the Great Depression but it didn’t […]