Robert Waldmann via Atrios How The Gamblers See Things George Stephanopoulos from twitter: Early read on Geithner plan from plugged in investment source asset managers he knows just won’t play until sure WH can control Congress See that’s the cost of acting from anger. The Obama administration is offering asset managers a chance to play […]
Robert Waldmann Tilman Tacke and I are quite cautious in this paper which does not support my pet theory described in this paper. The stylized fact (which has returned after a brief absence from the data) is that, given the income of poorer quintiles, where the rich are richer more babies die. My pet theory […]
Robert Waldmann The bill passed by the House of Representatives which imposes a 90% tax on bonuses paid to people who earn over 250,000/year by firms which received TARP funds makes the hair on Noam Scheibers neck stand up.He writes As for the consequences we can’t foresee, most of them relate to the precedent of […]
The House has just passed a bill taxing Bonuses of employees (and consultants I hope) who earn over $ 250,000/year of TARP recipients at a rate of 90%. I think this is an excellent bill. My reasoning is simple. If I were to ignore incentive effects, I would support a 90% tax on income over […]
Robert Waldmann I think this excellent article by Binyamin Appelbaum and Brady Dennis buries the lede. Appelbaum and Dennis argue that there is no need now and there was no need when the bonus contracts were written to retain the AIGFP scum crooks employees, because AIGs most risky contracts have been unwound. I consider the […]
Tilman Tacke & Robert J. Waldmann Do health outcomes not only depend on an individual’s absolute level of income, but also on their relative income position within a society? We use infant mortality as a heath status indicator and find a significant and positive link between infant mortality and income inequality using cross-national data for […]
Robert Waldmann playing faux naif again (except it’s not faux). What is the point of bundling securities into a special purpose entity and issuing debt tranches with various levels of seniority and issuing (or keeping) an equity tranche which doesn’t promise a fixed payment ? This was a very profitable operation until recently. How could […]
Robert Waldmann In this post below , I note that I find Brad DeLong’s analogy between the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble and the stimulus plan unconvincing. The post is poorly written, but the point is that in fresh water models rapid technological progress is very different from a demand shock, and, so, if one […]
Robert Waldmann In fact, I agree with DeLong and don’t even have a clear idea who Say was (don’t know his first name do know he wrote before Ricardo). In standard economist speak Say’s law states that output can’t be below the quantity that people want to supply given wages and prices, that aggregate demand […]
This is a *demand side* argument in favor of Fama’s claim that deficit spending crowds out private spending one for one. My earlier effort was to argue that the aggregate supply curve can be vertical (real aggregate supply is not affected by nominal aggregate dmeand) even when there is involuntary unemployment. I think I get […]