Forty years ago, in 1968, an American major after the battle of Ben Tre in Viet Nam was quoted by Peter Arnett as having declared, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Now, we have the contemporary version, from U.S. President George Walker Bush: “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market […]

Anyone have a link to the actual Debt Audit Commission report that has Ecuador deciding to default on its illegal debt? None of the news sites that talks about it seems to know of a copy on the web. (Spanish ok, English preferred.)

If you need to know why we need government (G) spending, consider that there is no investment (I), and the plight of the consumer is summarized here: The rest is basic algebra.

Sometimes, Blog Posts Write Themselves: Cleaning up a hard drive of old files, I ran across these two articles from the middle of last year. First, the WSJ, arbiter of business sanity and purveyor of a positive meme whenever one is to be found, on 28 July 2007—nine months after the general supply of securitizable […]

Look no further than some of the brain-dead idiocy suggested as part of this NY Times poll of economists. Saddest quote of the day is from Andrew Samwick, who decided to be stupid the day the U.S. elected a non-Republican president: “If I had my druthers, the word ’stimulus’ would be expunged from public discussion, […]

Ken Houghton Pulled from comments (to the Librarian post at Eschaton): [W]ithout economic knowledge, DFHs don’t understand why the bailout of banks so that they would keep credit flowing is critical, while the bailout of the auto industry caused by the fact that the banks spent the money on acquisitions and executive pay instead of […]

I don’t feel like talking about economics right now, so let’s talk Rock and Roll. The contract with Van Halen’s legendary “brown M&Ms” rider has been published by The Smoking Gun. And it was there for purely rational reasons: While the underlined rider entry has often been described as an example of rock excess, the […]

CNN works hard for its money: Although ex-presidents in Adams’ day quickly descended into obscurity after their years in the Oval Office, today the transition away from serving as the leader of the free world is high-profile, potentially very lucrative and, above all, a difficult job in itself. This is especially true for Bush, historians […]

Among their editorial suggestions for replacing Tim Geither as head of the New York FRB: Better choices would include …David Malpass, an economist who worked at the Reagan Treasury and long predicted the credit bubble…. Yes, you saw that correctly. David Malpass. Strangely, they don’t describe him as “David Malpass, former Chief Economist for Bear […]

Brad DeLong sends us to Rex Nutting at MarketWatch: U.S. nonfarm payrolls plunged by an astonishing 533,000 in November, the worst job loss in 34 years, the Labor Department reported Friday. It’s only the fourth time in the past 58 years that payrolls have fallen by more than 500,000 in a month. Since the recession […]