UPDATE: datacharmer at Bluematter thinks visually. Bruce, yesterday: Unless you have had the experience of using an advanced smartphone it is hard to explain how transforming it is to have the Internet in your pocket, if I have a question about anything it is mostly as close as my left pocket. But like the iPhone […]

CBO: At 9.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), that deficit would be slightly smaller than the shortfall of 9.9 percent of GDP ($1.4 trillion) posted in 2009. [emphasis mine] A 7.1% decline in real GDP terms isn’t just “slightly smaller”; it’s a real improvement that is greater than any (mythical or not) “spending freeze” […]

Bruce Bartlett: The Fed has talked openly about new procedures to soak up the bank reserves it has created even as those reserves remain largely idle and unlent. You don’t get inflation if there is no money multiplier in play. So long as the banks are just holding the cash, worries about monetary policy leading […]

The world would be a much better place if people had listened to Tom last August: Now some elite opinion favors Ben Bernanke’s reappointment, but politicians are irritated over Fed stonewalling of bailout oversight and others (e.g. Dean Baker) point out that Ben Bernanke who put the Fed throttles to the firewall to save the […]

Via David Wessel’s Twitter feed, the WSJ publishes a letter: Ben Bernanke is a good person, a fine academic and a well-respected professor. But those traits have no bearing on whether he should be reconfirmed as Federal Reserve chairman…. Applying accountability principles, there’s no way Chairman Bernanke should be reconfirmed by the Senate, let alone […]

It’s bad enough to violate Brad DeLong’s first rule (which, I hasten to rationalize, was posted when DeLong himself was disagreeing). It’s worse when the opposition to Krugman is coming from…the WSJ editorial page. (Or, as Barry Ritholtz correctly describes it, “the comics section.” Just less funny, and more likely to make the two-drink minimum […]

Slowly moving back into everything, and so catching up with Mark Thoma’s use of Paul Volcker as his latest line of Defense of Giving the Fed More Regulatory Power. (Amusing in itself, given Volcker’s description of the Fed before he was Owned by the Obama Administration.) I like Thoma (a lot more than he likes […]

The flak started quickly. Rusty suggested taking Red Cross training and being part of the solution—the very solution that can’t reach the country. kharris compared me (un?)favorably to The Drudge Report for saying (after Robert Gates did) that the delivery obstruction was “deliberate.” The problem is the evidence keeps mounting—and it’s all on my side. […]

Via Constance, I see that the donations are pouring in. Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), Partners in Health, even the American Red Cross. There is supply. And there is clearly demand. But it appears that delivery is being deliberately impeded: As life-saving medical supplies, food, water purification chemicals and vehicles pile up at the […]

The rest is details: The reason I choose to pay through the nose for my computers is very simple: unlike just about every other manufacturer in the business, Apple appreciate the importance of good industrial design. but they’re nice details. (posted from my daughters’s “new” G4, which needs a new keyboard, but has a right […]