For the record, both my daughters were vaccinated today, under government supervision at no cost to us, in a procedure that took less than 10 minutes—including getting a five-year-old to take her coat off and, post shot, put it on again. Via Felix Salmon’s Twitter feed, without further comment. (cross-posted from Skippy the Bush Kangaroo)
As I am arguing on the same side as Henry Kaufman, and against the kind-hearted Mark Thoma, does the phrase “left-of-center” at the top of this blog have as much Memory Meaning as the Suzanne Vega song from Pretty in Pink? Kaufman: During the Greenspan years (1987-2006), the Fed clearly failed to recognize the significance […]
First, David Leonhardt argued that this recession was good for workers. Now, Floyd Norris apparently has decided to mix and match data. (I wonder if the fact many NYT employees who are looking at their 45-day severance offers is having an effect on its economic coverage.) One of the standard “economist jokes” is about the […]
I try to like the NYTimes Economics Reporting. I really do. Heck, any place that publishes Uwe Reinhardt can’t be all bad. But David Leonhardt, as he does often enough that I hesitate to read his work, again goes beyond the pale today, and clearly does so deliberately. The offending paragraph: Twenty-two months after the […]
Among the people who have been updating The Theory of Finance for the ObamaNation is Gregg Sommerville, whose job depends to some significant extent on people not believing the following riff: More music below the fold. The Bailout Rap and the Subprime Mortgage Blues
It took me many years to understand the phrase “moral hazard.” It’s a fundamental tenet of economics, usually used to explain that, since consumers are untrustworthy, businesses need to charge them more.* It was finally cleared up for me in the midst of a presentation last year about how it’s a “moral hazard” issue that […]
Mish sends us to “Track the Money,” recovery.gov’s breakdown of where funds have been sent and spent. He’s not happy, but I suspect he’s suffering the Jared Bernstein Problem: only looking at one side of the equation. But—and this is the key “but”—the reason it is right to do that is that ARRA money has […]
AIG is bankrupt, but Manchester United still wears their logo. However, when Dutch bank DSB Bank NV filed bankruptcy, Stephen Colbert had to step in to sponsor U.S. Speedskating? Maybe the Dutch understand Sports Economics and the Americans don’t?* *J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, Skip Sauer, to name just three, would dissent from the last statement. […]
Via Greg Mitchell’s Twitter feed, lying isn’t just for the IB branch any more: Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman’s then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003. Unable to identify a […]
The question: How much was credit being funneled away from all other sectors in the economy? The answer: Very little if any. Neither the general consumer lending: nor the specific Real Estate lending: appears to run in a different direction that Business Loans, except possibly, in the latter case, in late 2003 and early 2004. […]