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 […]
I want to try to punch above my weight (and be a troll) and contest this Dr. Kathryn Hibbert, director of the medical intensive care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital … said it will take weeks or months to get results and doctors and patients will need to wait for the results of the clinical […]
Abbreviated coronavirus dashboard for April 18 Here is the update through yesterday (April 17) There are some extended comments I want to make about the pandemic, and some graphs comparing States, etc., that are best done separately, so this will be an abbreviated update. Here are yesterday’s numbers. Number and rate of increase of Reported […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 13 – 17 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The final dominoes among the coincident indicators fell this past week. In the “real economy,” the impact of the coronavirus pandemic is fully priced in. In the stock market . . . I’m […]
What the Index of Leading Indicators tells us about the 2020 Presidential election One of the better econometric models that I made use of back in 2016 was that by Prof. Robert S. Erickson of Columbia University and Prof. Christopher Wlezien of the University of Texas at Austria, entitled “Forecasting the Presidential Vote with leading economic […]
Corporate Bond Spreads and the Pandemic The St. Louis FED has an economics blog: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruption in economic activity across the globe. Financial markets, in particular, have experienced surges in volatility that had not been seen since the 2007-09 financial crisis … The figure below plots the median value for […]
Jason Brennan has a new post up doubling down on his earlier criticism of epidemiologists and government policy in response to the COVID crisis. I responded to his earlier blog posts here. I am still not convinced, but there are useful lessons to be learned from going through his argument. Brennan continues to claim that […]
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 […]
Unemployment has shot up in many countries especially including the USA. Is it time for aggregate demand stimulus ? One interesting thing (noted by Krugman in his newsletter which should still be a blog) is that Keynesians (including Krugman) are not treating everything as a nail, because all they have is a hammer. He (and […]
I am going to attempt a briefer clearer version of this post I am interested in critiquing (and mostly praising) the CARES Act and discussing what still needs to be done. I think my points (if any) are that an extraordinary unforseen crisis simplifies some issues and relaxes some constraints. I will now go by […]