CBO: At 9.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), that deficit would be slightly smaller than the shortfall of 9.9 percent of GDP ($1.4 trillion) posted in 2009. [emphasis mine] A 7.1% decline in real GDP terms isn’t just “slightly smaller”; it’s a real improvement that is greater than any (mythical or not) “spending freeze” […]
Bruce Bartlett: The Fed has talked openly about new procedures to soak up the bank reserves it has created even as those reserves remain largely idle and unlent. You don’t get inflation if there is no money multiplier in play. So long as the banks are just holding the cash, worries about monetary policy leading […]
The world would be a much better place if people had listened to Tom last August: Now some elite opinion favors Ben Bernanke’s reappointment, but politicians are irritated over Fed stonewalling of bailout oversight and others (e.g. Dean Baker) point out that Ben Bernanke who put the Fed throttles to the firewall to save the […]
Via David Wessel’s Twitter feed, the WSJ publishes a letter: Ben Bernanke is a good person, a fine academic and a well-respected professor. But those traits have no bearing on whether he should be reconfirmed as Federal Reserve chairman…. Applying accountability principles, there’s no way Chairman Bernanke should be reconfirmed by the Senate, let alone […]
It’s bad enough to violate Brad DeLong’s first rule (which, I hasten to rationalize, was posted when DeLong himself was disagreeing). It’s worse when the opposition to Krugman is coming from…the WSJ editorial page. (Or, as Barry Ritholtz correctly describes it, “the comics section.” Just less funny, and more likely to make the two-drink minimum […]
It’s coming closer: Once the tax expires, those inheriting estates after Dec. 31 will have to pay capital gains taxes on any asset sold. The cost will be based on the original price of the property, which could mean record-keeping headaches and bigger tax bills for some people. “If we do not extend our estate […]
UPDATE: Greg Sargent (via Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter feed) notes that I am hardly alone in my concluding pargraph. The last even semi-useful part of health care “reform” (and that was of dubious value) is dead: The idea of letting people ages 55 to 64 buy into Medicare, announced just last week, had threatened to explode […]
The Shrill One (tm – Brad DeLong) as Optimist: The result, then, will be high unemployment leading into the 2010 elections, and corresponding Democratic losses. These losses will be worse because Obama, by pursuing a uniformly pro-banker policy without even a gesture to popular anger over the bailouts, has ceded populist energy to the right […]
Floyd Norris is Shocked! Shocked! to Find Goldman Sachs controls Congress as well as the Treasury. Where has he been for the past three years? Imagine the reaction if, perhaps during the 1998 Asian financial crisis, a group of Republican legislators had threatened to block legislation unless a contributor to their campaigns received special treatment. […]
Rick Perry famously declared that there was no recession in Texas, even though the only way they balanced the budget was through emergency funding. Rick Perry and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas appear not to talk with each other: Texas factory activity showed the first signs of bottoming out in September, according to the […]