There are quite a few blogs in the blogosphere who tend to get the PPACA wrong and conflate the issues of it well beyond what is reasonable and truthful. Maybe they just do not know what the facts are and miss the benefits of the PPACA to dwell on the negatives exclusively.  Many  tend to […]

Via Naked Capitalism comes more comment on two major global trade agreements also discussed here at Angry Bear. I keep wondering when our national conversation will get around to acknowledging ‘pro-business’ as having a second question to answer: which businesses mostly benefit and which lose out? And a third: what are the rules of free […]

By recent norms this was an unusual employment report in that the data worked the way we would like to see. In the household survey the unemployment rate fell to 7.5% because the labor force rose by 210,000 while employment increased a larger 293,00 so the number of unemployed fell by -83,000.

Great presidents rise above circumstance. Not Obama, at least not yet. At a news conference Tuesday marking the 100th day of his second and final term, the president seemed unwilling or unable to overcome stubborn GOP opposition. — Ron Fournier, National Journal, yesterday (h/t Jonathan Chait, New York magazine, today) Fournier’s right, of course. About […]

An old friend dropped by recently and we had a few beers on the back deck. He runs his family’s commercial real-estate business; they own and operate half a dozen or so pretty large properties (and just bought another) — a mall, office buildings, mixed use. I was really curious to talk to him about […]

I’m going to try to make this post brief and comprehensible.  It contains no information not in an earlier post but I delete a whole lot of distracting data. The question is does the Reinhart Rogoff (hence R-R) data set on public debt and real GDP in 20 rich countries post WWII contain evidence that a […]

Or to be more precise, all currency is consensus currency. Units of exchange (dollar bills, great big rocks at the bottom of the ocean) can have value merely because everyone in a community agrees that they have value. That value need not be declared, defined, or enforced by by some “fiat” authority with powers of (ultimately […]

This is a re-posting of a Bruce Webb post from January, 2010.  A reminder of a well crafted plan to date: Seven Steps to Social Security cuts via Debt Commission For those of you who didn’t go the short version of my comment is that the strategy to get major slashes to Social Security and […]

Here I  analyze the data set used by Reinhart and Rogoff (R-R) and by Herndon Ash and Pollin (HAP) in their critique and in particular the stata data set RR-processed.dta with data on public debt to GDP ratios and real GDP growth in 20 developed countries since 1946. I show evidence that low growth causes […]

Or: Thinking About Periods and Lags No need to rehash this cock-up, except to point to the utterly definitive takedown by Arindrajit Dube over at Next New Deal (hat tip: Krugman), and to point out that the takedown might just take even if you’re looking at R&R’s original, skewed data. But a larger point: I frequently see econometrics like R&R’s, comparing […]