Live link is here. Blog posts to follow on my usual schedule.

I step out of the dark bathroom. (Really, the light is out and we’re around 26,000 feet—pretty certain it’s the even numbers if you’re flying West.) Wandering back to my seat, I see multiple people using electronic devices, including one gentleman who is listening to an album of Iggy Pop’s.  I know this because his […]

“Think of the first rule of economics: if somebody has money in his pocket, somebody else is trying to take it out.” (via Steve Randy Waldman’s Twitter feed)

We generally start this evening with the birth of Moses (Exodus 2:2-3; “And the woman conceived , and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. 3 And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and […]

I have screamed for the last several years that the problem with economics isn’t that Macro is problematic; DSGE is a detour but—as Noah Smith shows here—it can be used as an access road. The problem is assuming that “micromotives” must be universal.  For all of the emphasis about the glories of using natural logs […]

A few days ago, Dr. Black gave the game away: The actions of our Fed have been ineffective because they’ve relied on the banking channel even though quite obviously our financial sector is completely screwed up.

Robert’s post gets me wondering, as we enter the seventh year of the Great Recession (NBER also doesn’t treat either 1873-1897 or 1929-1945 as a single period) that there’s probably a good reason for the “changing” attitude toward food stamps. So let’s conduct an unscientific poll in comments:  in the past ten years–say, January, 2004 […]

It is naïve to think banks utilising complex trading strategies and products, across global markets, can be supervised using simple rules (even if calibrated to penal settings). Indeed, an important driver has been the necessity to address perverse incentives that are created by simple rules. – Stegan Ingves, 24 Jan 2013

Baseball lost a piece of history yesterday, as my great-aunt Edith died, about a week shy of what would have been her 101st birthday. Reference articles here, here, and here.

This coming weekend is the annual Jon Swift Memorial Blogroll Amnesty, the reasoned, proportionate response to some of the Bigger Names suddenly deciding that they needed to cull their recommendations.  Swift’s brilliant (and certainly modest) proposal was that you should instead find five blogs with lower hits than you and recommend (i.e., promote) them, not […]