Via Robert’s Twitter Feed, and to avoid ranting about 401(k)s before the end of May, here’s a Rant Well Worth Reading. (Warning: PG-13 or R rating; D. Aritophanes channels The Rude Pundit). Clean Excerpt: What’s the catch? That’s the beautiful thing … there is none! It’s all totally risk-free for you from start to finish! […]

Effect Cause

Ken Houghton wants to sidebar today into looking at the general application and implications of an Accounting Identity: Assets = Liabilities + Equity (A=L+E, or the ALE Rule). Let us assume that, since the housing bubble burst, I believe that my house has fallen in value by too much. I would understand a 20% decline, […]

Following up on Robert’s post (he started later and finished earlier): Dr. Black: [T]he idea that all this came about simply because the banksters decided a bit of extra risk was good is an idea only a macro finance person could sanely entertain. All right, I represent that remark in more ways than one. So […]

UPDATE: Dr. Black twists the knife. The Geithner Plan FAQ is worth reading; it’s a classic example of treating an incomplete market as if it were the entire market. And note that “skin in the game” is limited to a part of the local pool. Unfortunately, while Treasury plays in the wading pool, hedge funds […]

My Loyal Reader notes that the economic survival of Zimbabwe’s current government is now largely dependent on sin taxes: As he presented his revised 2009 budget to parliament, Finance Minister Tendai Biti noted that “indirect taxes made up of customs and excise duty have contributed 88 percent of government revenue, which means that the government […]

Lawrence Wilkerson tells the truth and shames the Devil: Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. “There are still innocent people there,” Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of […]

Looking at Population Change data derived from version 6.2 of the Penn World Tables. It appears that the population of Kuwait declined by 55.46% in 1991, only to increase 48.64% in the following year. I’m inclined to think of this as measurement error, not a mass exodus following by a mass return after the invasion. […]

George Will, guest-posting chez Berube: But hope is not a financial plan, and rewards come only to those who work for them. It is time for the Democrats to grow up, learn the lessons of adulthood, and begin dismantling a tax system which creates so many disincentives to wealth creation. Justice demands that bonuses must […]

In Conversations with Economists (h/t Kevin Quinn at Econospeak), James Tobin refers to LBJ having made “a mistake” in “raising taxes to pay for the Viet Nam War.” Google Desktop can’t find the line of reasoning behind that in any of Tobin’s papers that have survived my migrating possibly-non-OCR PDFs over about six computers. Anyone […]