Ken Houghton’s Loyal Reader directed my attention to this WSJ blog entry, commenting on, and attempting to provide cover for, the management and actions of The Old Firm. I’m sympathetic to the general argument—Ace Greenberg’s naming of Jimmy Cayne to succeed him was incredibly bad judgment that had real consequences, but not malice aforethought—but the […]

Ken Houghton notes that no one has stolen my ID or shifted my sense of politics or the economy. Brad DeLong has been running excerpts from the February 2009 Vanity Fair “Oral History” of the Bush White House. Time and priorities being what they are, I didn’t get a chance to read the whole piece […]

Posted for discussion. First, relating to the discussion in comments to rdan’s TBI post, Annual Change in U.S. output per hour: And, for future discussion, the Relationship between Oil Prices and the Consumer Price Index for the past sixty-plus years.

That Bob Kerrey would be a CF* choice for running a school. *We don’t write out this word on a family blog. For those who don’t recognize the abbreviation, see James Kunstler.

Suppose I told you that there was a crisis with a stock, say, GE. That the price of the stock had dropped around 75% in the past year. And you responded, “But the problem is solved; the prices of long-term Call Options (say, the January 2011 20s) has gone up, as has their Open Interest. […]

I’m going to have to do a little clean-up work here (i.e., run the data in Excel instead of Stata), so I’ll ask forgiveness for the double-labels and all that.Graphic redone; data as per FRED. I think the story is clear. The long version is Bruce’s post below. What is now the top line is […]

Headline from the Christian Science Monitor: “As G-20 battles protectionism, a cautionary tale in Ecuador” [emphasis mine] Subhead for that same article: “The country has put steep tariffs on an array of goods. Seventeen of the world’s 20 largest economies have broken recent promises not to take protectionist measures.” [emphasis mine] Presumably, the other three […]

Greg Mitchell’s twitter feed reminds us of Upton Sinclair’s 1934 campaign for Governor of California. Working on Sinclair’s campaign, as noted in an article we ran several years ago in NYRSF, was a former Naval Officer in his mid-20s whose career was cut short by tuberculosis: Robert A. Heinlein. As Mitchell notes: The champion of […]

McGill University Macroeconomics Comprehension Exam, May 2003, Question 10 (Essay): The stock market bubble burst in the spring of 2000. The popular pres now talks about a housing bubble, referring to ever rising prices of houses in North America (and elsewhere). They say that if the housing bubble bursts it will have a much more […]

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