Straight from the Mercatus Institute, libertarian Tyler Cowen notes that fund managers who donate to Democrats outperformed fund managers who donated to Republicans. The difference is small compared to the huge volatility of stock market returns, but it is not small compared to the variance of the performance of the two groups of fund managers. […]

As far as I can tell the Trump train tweet is authentic (and authentic click bait). Checking his time line I found this more recent tweet FRED begs to differ The tweet might show Trump cherry picking (and cheating on “through”). After Bush and the Republicans (with assistance from Democrats including Bill Clinton) left the […]

This is genuinely amazing (h/t @jbarro) http://observer.com/2016/07/wikileaks-dismantling-of-dnc-is-clear-attack-by-putin-on-clinton/ New York Observer is a weekly newspaper… . Since July 2006, the paper has been owned and published by the American real‑estate figure Jared Kushner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Observerqqq I quote without comment It’s no secret that the DNC was recently subject to a major hack, one which independent cybersecurity experts […]

Of course the big news is that Russian hackers (probably linked to the Russian government) hacked Democratic National Committee servers and leaked embarassing e-mails (and deliberately leaked social security numbers) via Wikileaks. This supports the hypothesis that Putin is trying to get Trump elected. It sounds like a fringe tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, but I […]

I was fairly certain that if Clinton were elected president and the Democrats were to win a majority in the Senate, that they would lose that majority in 2018. I think that Hillary Clinton may have proven me wrong and found the only way to prevent that — by causing the Democrats to lose the […]

For days, I have felt morally obliged to report on the Italian slow motion crisis of banks with tens of billions of non performing loans. I’ve had trouble making myself work (as usual). So I hand the mike to Daniel Davies. The background is that the world’s oldest bank Monte Dei Paschi di Sienna is […]

Paul Krugman interpreted the recent decline of 10 year safe interest rates from extremely low to astonishingly low as a capitulation to stagnation. He argued (convincingly) that investors have decided that short term safe interest rates will remain extremely low for a long time (evidently at least 10 years) and that the post 2008 pattern […]

As always, I seek an economic issue on which I disagree with Paul Krugman. I think I might only partially agree with his recent tweet storm. I certainly think that Twitter is not the best medium for discussion of economic theory. update: The man can be irritating. His op-ed (too short but better than a […]

I think this post by Dylan Matthews is brilliant and a must read. He says we should focus less on equality of opportunity and more on average outcomes and equality of outcomes. When you say Dylan he thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas (whoever he was), man he ain’t got no respect for posts on […]

I find Jon Chait extremely interesting and stimulating. I often check his blog and regret the rareness of his posts (look who’s typing). He usually overstates his case and has an even the liberal New Republic hippy punching background. This subtitle is pure click bait How Can Hillary Clinton Win the Bernie Sanders Vote? By […]