Yves Smith adds her thoughts on possibilities of the market price decline for oil: When the Saudis announced their intention not to support oil prices when they were sliding towards $90 and plunged quickly through that level, we deemed the move to be a masterstroke. It served to damage both economic and political enemies. On […]

Lifted from comments: Dean Baker adds a comment on Spencer England’s post on Part time employment statistics being (Spencer writes…”John R. Graham is a beautiful example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. The researchers at the right wing think tanks scour the economic releases for anything that they can spin to sell their […]

Noah Smith states that there is no “cycle” to the business cycle. (link) My response on twitter was, “…there can be definable limits without a cycle.” Can we define the limit of a business cycle? I have a model that describes what a limit to the business cycle might look like in terms of a […]

Stephen Williamson wrote a critique of this post which critique was praised by David Andolfato and Noah Smith. Williamson critiques the Keynesianism defined as So, as I learned from Dick Lipsey in 1975, and my cat learned last fall, Keynesian Cross is (1) C = A + cY, (2) Y = C + I + […]

Dan here…Paul Krugman New York Times Dec. 24 notes Robert’s thinking on current story lines by some economists in macromedia.  Other posts by Robert on the subject can be found here, here, here, and here.  Krugman writes:  Robert Waldmann is shocked, shocked, to find conservative economists not doing their homework: Even now, I am shocked that economists didn’t bother to […]

http://bonddad.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-oil-choke-collar-2015-may-be-acid.html The Oil Choke Collar: 2015 may be the acid test – by New Deal democrat It’s nice to be proven right.  Even more, it’s nice to be proven right, for the right reason. Back in 2011, I described what I called the “Oil choke collar,” writing: For the second time in two years, Oil’s […]

Holiday present for you via Congress and the Cromnibus. Tucked into the massive spending bill Congress passed this weekend was legislation that reversed 40 years of federal law protecting retirees’ pensions.  The change will allow benefit cuts for up to 10 million workers, many of them part of a shrinking middle-class workforce in businesses such […]

If anyone means to deliberate successfully about anything, there is one thing he must do at the outset: he must know what it is he is deliberating about. Otherwise he is bound to go utterly astray. Now, most people fail to realize that they don’t know what this or that really is. Consequently when they […]

(Dan here update…other posts by Robert Waldmann on the issues can be found here, here, here, and here.) G and GDP during the current recovery update Stephen Williamson asks “Where’s the multiplier” (I have read only the title not the post). Since I regressed rates of growth on rates of growth, my coefficient of grGDP on grG = 0.339 […]

Noah Smith has an excellent post which is very critical of something John Cochrane wrote. I added a couple more criticisms in comments Your post is very good as usual. I’d add a couple of things. Cochrane wrote “With the 2013 sequester, Keynesians warned that reduced spending and the end of 99-week unemployment benefits would […]