The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times The Times today ran a truly execrable article warning us that, once the virus has passed, we will suffer dire consequences from the runup of government debt. As most readers know, this argument is theoretically illiterate, derived from the false comparison between household and government debt. We’ve been […]
Prairie du Chien Selects Jill Karofsky Over David Kelly! I have previously posted on the highly swingy politicsal nature of southwestern Wisconsin, symbolized by the town there at the mouth of the Wisconsin River, French-founded Prairie du Chien (named for an Indian cheif, it turns out, who was “Dog of the Prairie” in English). It […]
Trump Defunds WHO and USPS: Will Motherhood and Apple Pie Be Next? Yes, Trump is out to cut the roughly half a billion $ US contribution to the $6 billion budget of the World Health Organization (WHO). It seems that he now sees his path to reelection to be based on blaming China for the […]
Consumer prices sharply decline in March: keep your eye on wages This morning we got some monthly economic data that will be actually valuable to watch throughout this Coronavirus Recession: consumer prices. That’s because during recessions, consumer price growth decelerates, as does wage growth, which continues to decelerate well after the recession bottoms out. […]
The Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal The Covid-19 pandemic won’t last forever, and at some point we will have to return to figuring out how to respond to the climate crisis. (What a depressing opening line. No, I have no desire to live in a world of permanent crisis.) Is the answer a […]
Remdesivir and Transfer Pricing Part II Now that I sketched out the transfer pricing for Gilead Sciences with respect to their successful HIV and Hep C products (as much as I can say based on publicly available information), it is time to speculate a bit on how Remdesivir may play out. There is a lot we do […]
The D Word Yes, depression, and not the psychological type, although the economic type leads to the psychological type, whether ot not it is the other way around (see Keynes’ “animal spirits). I often make fun of Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post, but in Washington Post today he raised the possibility that we […]
The Mankiw CV Plan Greg Mankiw has posted a suggestion for delivering money to people that targets the benefit to those who need it the most. The idea is clever: 1. Pay people the benefit B. (This could be spread over many weeks or months.) Everyone gets the same B. 2. Next year at tax time, […]
Coronavirus dashboard for March 26: southern “red” States resist effective measures Here is the update through yesterday (March 25) In order to succeed in containing the pandemic, I believe that the US needs at least 2 weeks of China (nearly complete lockdown) followed by at least a month of South Korea (very aggressive and widespread […]
Congress and the Fed Could Ensure Universal Protection During the Pandemic No matter how well or poorly the federal government addresses the overall economic crisis, millions of vulnerable people will be left unprotected. Homeless people, incarcerated people, immigrants, people in fringe, off-the-books employment like day labor—unless steps are taken that specifically target them, they are […]