Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

The simple challenges to Abenomics

This little video puts into 1 minute and 43 seconds, the simple challenges to Abenomics in Japan. Getting money from the corporations into the pockets of the people, namely labor, namely the consumers. Aging population on fixed income. They like deflation. Small percentage of children in population. Children are actually outnumbered by pets.  

Alan Greenspan’s new book

Brad DeLong reviews Alan Greenspan’s new book: Alan Greenspan: The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting: The true size of the American subprime problem was hidden for years by the defective bookkeeping of the GSEs…. Not until the summer of 2007 did the full magnitude of the subprime problem […]

The Efficient Racing Hypothesis

by Mike Kimel The Efficient Racing Hypothesis Professor Sporkweather Mo of Fridgewater University has famously postulated that a driver cannot consistently achieve better than average finishes on a recklessness-adjusted basis, provided that all drivers have the same information on track and weather conditions at the start of a race. Using decades of data on drivers […]

Who is the true beneficiary of welfare? or Please define: Entitlement

I wrote in February of 2012 about welfare: Welfare, I’m not hurting from it and neither are you. I noted the following: but it looks to me like what we spend on welfare is not much more than what the government is spending on just doing the government thingy, unless of course people can’t get […]

Irish Austerity Exodus Continues

The Eurozone experiment in austerity continues to fail as the peripheral countries endure ongoing cuts. Following up on my post of August 15, it’s time to look at the most recent Irish immigration data to update it through April 2013 (Ireland records population data from May 1 to April 30) and see how it affects […]

A tale of two incomes in the money market

Real GDP has dropped to a new level. Many economists think it will return to its previous trend before the crisis. I made this video to explain how real GDP can drop to a new level as a result of labor share of income dropping after the crisis.   Capital income rose after the crisis, […]

Ben Bernankepoulos mets Erskine Fatas

Antonio Fatas debates Paul Krugman. Fatas noted that there is limited evidence that using the Euro is correlated with extreme economic distress. Krugman argued roughly that there is a strong theoretical presumption that the Euro is the work of the devil. Fatas praised Krugman’s unshrill analysis and then chose to debate his basic claim. This […]