Robert Waldmann A specter is haunting Paul Krugman — it is the specter of apparently sophisticated forecasters who predict a huge spike in US long term bond rates in the near future. He notes that most investors can’t believe this or rates would already be high. He also notes that some of those who are […]

Robert Waldmann The one by Paul Krugman is a must read. what I hear is that officials don’t trust the demand for long-term government debt, because they see it as driven by a “carry trade”: financial players borrowing cheap money short-term, and using it to buy long-term bonds. [skip] the remedy should be financial, not […]

Robert Waldmann Can the Fed do any more to stimulate the economy ? The question is back. The answer is only by making credible promises about the fairly distant future. My view is that this means no. I review the issue after the jump. Long ago Paul Krugman proposed that the Bank of Japan target […]

Robert Waldmann+ I paraphrase Kevin Drum My post last night about the CMS report on healthcare reform … [was not] a model of clarity. For more, see Ezra Klein here and Jon Gruber here. Combined with … [Drum’s original] post and this Wonk Room post, you should get a pretty good idea of what’s up. […]

Robert goes out on a limb and guesses that Lori Montgomery fell for (or is pushing) Republican spin in this article in the Washington PostReport: Bill would reduce senior careMedicare cuts approved by House may affect access to providers A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending — one of the […]

Robert Waldmann Larry Summers, who is very very good at provoking debate, said “It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.” Paul Krugman responds here True. But we are not, in fact, expanding the total amount […]

Robert Waldmann is joining The Pigou Club and hopes for at least some discussion in comments. That is all.

Robert Waldmann I am eager to learn from this blog again. A problem with solar and wind generation of electricity is the sun isn’t always shining and the wind isn’t always blowing and it is costly to store energy. I don’t see why energy can’t be stored using hydroelectric dams. They store huge amounts of […]

Paul Krugman argued that optimal fiscal policy in a liquidity trap targets unemployment equal to the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). He uses a model with Ricardian equivalence. This means that the public debt does not affect consumption. When he wrote his post, I said I thought his conclusion depended on this assumption. […]

Robert Waldmann Don’t say you weren’t warned. I am trying to understand the effects of the switch from mechanically controlled machine tools to electronically controlled machine tools and then to digitally controlled machine tools. I don’t really know much about machine tools, but, then again, I don’t know much about firms or the business cycle […]