Recently, I was pleased to note a disagreement between Paul Krugman and Dean Baker. Finally, I hoped, a chance to prove I am not a knee jerk acolyte of Krugman. Sadly I found I agreed with Krugman and not Baker (ouch). But I didn’t give up hope, until yesterday. Surely, I can disagree with Krugman […]
Andrew Bacevich writes: Twelve and a half years after Congress didn’t declare war on an organization of hundreds or, at most, thousands of jihadis scattered mainly across the backlands of the planet, and instead let President George W. Bush and his cohort loose to do whatever they wanted; twelve and a half years after the […]
Update: Link at Scotus blog http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/06/wednesday-round-up-187/. As prosecutors, police agencies and civil libertarians consider the ruling’s implications, Justice Scalia’s stark dissent — and the fact that President Obama’s two appointees to the court so far agreed with it — makes it worthy of scrutiny, even if he was on the losing side. His argument is […]
This is a companion piece to Steve’s AB post from earlier today, where he points out the specious reasoning of “the likes of Scott Sumner, David Beckworth, Lars Christensen, et al., claiming that fiscal austerity has obviously had no effect on GDP growth.” I wrote Sumner off a few years ago due to a highly […]
You’re seeing a lot of crowing these days from the likes of Scott Sumner, David Beckworth, Lars Christensen, et al., claiming that fiscal austerity has obviously had no effect on GDP growth. “Look!” they say: “Even with the sequester and all the other government spending cuts, growth in 2013 has been the same as 2012! […]
by Mike Kimel An Open Letter to the Board of Trustees of Purdue University Dear Board of Trustees of Purdue University, If I may, I’d like to bring some facts about your President, Mitch Daniels, to your awareness. Now, it may be odd for me to do so, as I am not actually affiliated in […]
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff wrote an angry open letter about how Krugman has been uncivil to them. Krugman’s reply strikes me as being convincing even devastating. Update: My full fisking here. I want to focus on one sentence in the R&R letter “politicians may float a citation to an academic paper if it […]
I’d like to reply to one confusion and one set of pushbacks on yesterday’s post: Currency and Reserve Balances I buried one fact: banks can reduce total Fed reserve balances by withdrawing currency — physical cash — from their Fed reserve accounts. I only gestured toward this in a parenthetical and a link. It’s a trivial […]
Mark Dow had a great post the other day: There is zero correlation between the Fed printing and the money supply. Deal with it. He points out (emphasis mine): From 1981 to 2006 total credit assets held by US financial institutions grew by $32.3 trillion (744%). How much do you think bank reserves at the […]
Everyone “knows” that the corporate income tax is a mess. Ask any company. They pay too much in corporate income tax, face rates higher than in any other OECD country, and are just following the law when they use tax havens to keep profits eternally deferred from taxation and to perform general sleight-of-hand. Don’t […]