I guess I have to report. update: 2/28/2013It is hard to keep up with Grillo. His position has totally changed twice since I wrote the post below. His current view is that the PD (which has an absolute majority in the lower house) should vote confidence in a prime minister from his brand new party. […]
This post will be long, fairly wonky, and confused. I am typing, because I just have to stop playing with FRED and write something. My claim is that expected inflation over the next 5 (and 10 and 20) years is very similar to actual inflation over the past year. I think the data generally […]
The latest Bloomberg poll contains a few shocking results. Most responses are of the form a majority (but not a huge majority) agree with Obama and disagree with the Republicans in Congress. One shocking result is that a big big 6% correctly answer that the Federal budget deficit is decreasing. This beats the old low […]
I’d like to share and discuss a FRED graph. To me it shows an alarming similarity between inflation expected over the next five years and inflation over the past year. The title is not uh very useful. The red line is the nominal treasuries minus TIPS breakeven for constant maturity of 5 years — the […]
Warning: a thought just came to me. It might be totally wrong. A little knowledge of the law is dangerous. The idea is that the Fed can buy US federal government issued securities at will so I think it could buy one random T-bill for $ 1 trillion if it chose to do so. The […]
Now the old world can address the fiscal imbalance of the new. It seems that some of the best minds in the USA are trying to figure out how the US Treasury can disburse money without issuing debt. Finally a topic I know something about. There are many ways. 1) Paul Krugman proposes Moral Obligation […]
Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman are having a mini debate on whether Brad et al (that means the Clinton administration) had good reason to fear bond vigilantes in the 90s. Krugman wrote tht they did not.* Krugman phrases Brad’s argument as high deficits cause high inflation which causes tight money. He notes that the […]
The ever hopeful infinitely patient Ezra Klein attempts to find good Republican proposals for health care cost control. He notes that the Congressional leadership’s proposal to raise the Medicare eligibility age would increase total health care spending and sins grievously against Ballance writing “But an increase in the eligibility age would be a trophy that […]
Paul Krugman Dec 13 2012 after the surprise announcement and market reaction. So philosophically, this represents a conversion to the Evans criterion for rates and the Woodford/Krugman doctrine about monetary policy in a liquidity trap.Substantively, however, there isn’t that much going on here. Basically, Bernanke is promising that the Fed won’t do anything stupid — […]
Many have noted that under success hating kenyan islamosocialist Barack Obama nominal corporate profits just set a new record. Uh so what. A dollar isn’t worth what it used to be worth. Graphing nominal quantities is silly. The more interesting points is that the ratio of after tax corporate profits to GDP just set a […]