Most of time when I write something, I sign it. A piece in the first Great American Baseball Stat Book. The first three editions of a book called Interest Rate Trends and Comparisons put out by the bank at which I worked in the late 1980s.* Review pieces in various publications. A piece in Institutional […]
Not only did the U.S. Treasury just sell $29 Billion worth of four-week bills at par (i.e., they got $29 Billion for them, and will return $29 Billion on 29 December), but the bid to cover ratio was over 5:1 (pdf link; had $154B in bids for $29B in securities). This is down 0.06% from […]
Remember the argument that we shouldn’t tax people because they’ll just move elsewhere? The British government appears not to believe it. Will the Geithner/Summers axis continue lying that “we can’t do that”? Since it really is a Windfall Profit, taxing it seems a reasonable idea. And now we won’t even be able to pretend that […]
NYT headline: Audit Finds TARP Program Effective. Paragraph six of the same article: The Treasury’s lack of clarity about the program’s goals, the oversight panel said, made it hard to assess its overall effectiveness. Mr. Geithner is scheduled to testify on Thursday in his quarterly appearance before the five-member panel. [emphasis mine] Clearly. one of […]
Russ Roberts could at least pretend that Amity Shlaes (B.A., English Literature) had written a book related to economics, no matter how badly contrived and poorly researched it was. But what’s his excuse for this (B.A., English Literature, Penn; MBA Chicago)? Sadly, it appears he has stopped even pretending to be interested in economics, and […]
While Henry and Brad DeLong noted some more silly prattling from a brain-dead economist, AB readers and those wanting to maintain their sanity* will prefer The New Decembrists, and new blog from The Epicurean Dealmaker and, presumably, others. Worth it for TED’s Reformist Manifesto alone. *I do not necessarily assume that either of these sets […]
Larry Summers’s Village Idiot: I was too right to give them EVERYTHING! And now they’re being MEAN to me.
The Shrill One (tm – Brad DeLong) as Optimist: The result, then, will be high unemployment leading into the 2010 elections, and corresponding Democratic losses. These losses will be worse because Obama, by pursuing a uniformly pro-banker policy without even a gesture to popular anger over the bailouts, has ceded populist energy to the right […]
Floyd Norris is Shocked! Shocked! to Find Goldman Sachs controls Congress as well as the Treasury. Where has he been for the past three years? Imagine the reaction if, perhaps during the 1998 Asian financial crisis, a group of Republican legislators had threatened to block legislation unless a contributor to their campaigns received special treatment. […]
I would much prefer to think that all of this is a matter of his life being in turmoil throughout this decade, rather than Larry Summers being right about anything. Scott McLemee on Cornell West, with a hat tip to Henry at CT.)