Robert Waldmann Kevin Drum argues that it is a very bad thing that financial firms can pick their regulator For what it’s worth, I’d say that having a single bank regulator is long overdue. The current structure not only doesn’t make sense, but allows banks to shop around for the most lenient regulator they can […]

Robert Waldmann This post is an act of solidarity with DeLong’s heroic civil disobedience of absurd intellectual property restrictions. Brad writes (in full Brad. All’s fair with those who ignore “fair use” restrictions). Jacob Viner (1933), “Balanced Deflation, Inflation, or More Depression” Perhaps the most important single document with respect to how much the Chicago […]

He decides to consider current income the only determinant of savings. He writes of Sonia Sottomayer “My grandmother would have been shocked and appalled to see someone who makes so much save so little.” True and one can understand his grandmother’s total lack of appreciation for the work of Milton Friedman. Professor Mankiw, however, knows […]

Robert Waldmann In the post below, I totally humiliate myself by arguing that they way to appreciate “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” is to totally reject the idea that economists should aim for general theories. So which is it ? Do I reject “The General Theory …” or do I accept general […]

Robert Waldmann Oddly I imagine debating Niall Ferguson and manage to make a fool of myself.This requires genius in reverse, so I will post my thoughts as an example of what not to say. Brad DeLong quotes a “friend” who notes that Ferguson, lacking any valid arguments, attempted unsuccessfully to bait Krugman into losing his […]

Because a world without Leonard Cohen songs readily available to all in Frisian is not a world we want to live in: plagiarism confession: This post is entirely copied from Brad DeLong who quoted Justin FoxJustin Fox. See Maureen Dowd — that wasn’t so hard was it ?

Robert Waldmann James Surowiecki has an interesting article on this topic in the May 11 New Yorker. He reaches rather precise conclusions including “The desire to bring back the boring, small banking industry of the nineteen-fifties is understandable. Unfortunately, the only way to do that would be to bring back the economy of the fifties, […]

This is excellent news. One important aspect is that Saez is very reality based, that is empirical. As you have noted from time to time, the economics profession has had a very high opinion of theory in which results are rigorously derived from clearly false assumptions. Saez is, as far as I can tell from […]

Robert Waldmann Steve Benen made a graph out of a table from a column by Bruce Bartlett. Bruce Bartlett is an interesting figure — a heterodox conservative who praises Reagan and criticizes Bush Jr. The figure sure fits Bartlett’s line. It shows the effective tax rate on families with median income. Sad to say, Steve […]

Robert Waldmann WILLIAM D. COHAN has a rather harsh op-ed in the New York Times about Goldman Sachs’s reported $ 1.8 billion in profits in the first quarter. Ah op-eds about accounting in the New York Times. He notes, as many have on the web, that Goldman Sachs lost December 2008 when they switched from […]